Since then, while I enjoy plants and flowers, I just really don’t know where to start or how to care for them. What a great plant geek product!

My black thumb experiences are too numerous to recount, but in my most recent garden, I decided to grow some vegetables from seed. Instead of planting and labeling each pot consecutively like a normal person, I planted everything and laid out the packets so that I would know what to label each pot with. And my plan would have worked, had the wind not picked up. I have no idea what I’m growing now. I have pumpkins labeled as watermelons, green beans labeled as tomatoes. It’s a very pot luck experience to say the least.

I’ve had a few black thumb experiences. I was given an 11-year-old gardenia a few years back. It was fairly large, about 3′ across, and covered with lush, glossy green leaves. I did my very best to keep this plant healthy, and for a time it did well, being happily root-bound. The next year I was rewarded with a large number of fragrant white blooms, however, I made a strategic blunder the following winter by keeping the plant in the back of our windowed garage that my wife and I didn’t use for parking. As luck would have it my wife decided to start using the garage (how dare she! ) in the dead of winter. While this had the obvious advantage of keeping her car away from the elements, it had the unwanted side effect of letting in plenty of cold dry air because my wife often left the door up to permit easy access to the trunk of her car. If my intention was to preserve the gardenia in the style of Andean mountain mummies this would have been a swell way to do it. Unfortunately, that really wasn’t the plan, but that’s about how it turned out. My gardenia promptly expired, its once bright glossy green leaves shriveled up to an unsightly gray-green, looking for all the world like stunted sagebrush.

My wife felt bad and got me another gardenia, albeit much smaller, having survived a couple hard winters. It doesn’t go in the garage anymore though.