Several years ago I had a fortune cookie at a Chinese restaurant that was the only good fortune I have ever seen. I'm not saying that any of the fortunes were bad, but some made little to no sense, and the others were just generic sayings. The one fortune that I thought had value said this:"A wise man learns more from fools, than fools from the wise."
Since the saying speaks of fools and today is April Fool's Day I thought this fortune cookie might make a timely post. To make it relevant to my blog I'll relate the fortune to what else? Gardening! In its essence the fortune means that a wise person can learn from other people's mistakes. It also means that the fool doesn't listen to the wise man. Now if you correlate that to gardening you realize that a wise gardener learns from observing other gardening mistakes. A pretty simple concept yet it is still very important. By watching what other gardeners do and seeing what doesn't work or talking to other gardeners about their experiences you can make a mental note (or write one down on paper) so that you will never make the same mistake!
The mistake might be as simple as a combination of plants you don't like. It could be that a neighbor has planted a bad choice of a tree under power lines. It could be that the plants that looked so pretty at the nursery were really extremely invasive. It could be nearly anything. Learning from mistakes, both ours and other peoples, is essential in improving ourselves as gardeners. Let's face it mistakes are going to happen, but by learning what we did wrong we can learn to do better!
Do you have a fortune that you would like to share? (I'll take a check!)
The Pictures in this post have nothing to do with the actual post, they just dress it up a little. The top one is a tulip poplar blooming (The Tennessee State Tree) and the bottom one is an iris from my parent's yard. We've transplanted a couple dozen of them into our yard.