plantsWe are often told that plants manufacture all their own carbohydrates, or that they only take up nutrients in their ionic (chemical) form or that the nutrients must be dissolved in water, but plants have many sources for everything they need.

Many of these misconceptions arise from the erroneous interpretation of scientific experiments.

We cannot learn about a plant’s natural behaviour from growing it in an unnatural, sterile environment, subjecting it to unusual treatments, and finally dissecting its remains. Plants are an extension - an inseparable part of their environment.

Science likes to reduce everything to a single variable, but life is not like that, and plants are not mere mechanical contraptions.

Everything has more than one cause and more than one effect - the natural environment is a complex, interrelated and connected web of life. The lives of plants, animals and microbes are so closely entwined that it’s impossible to know where one ends and another starts.

A single change, a single introduction of a foreign substance has far reaching effects. Many decades later we begin to see the disastrous environmental effects of pesticide use, or the climatic effects of clear-cutting our forests.

Organic gardeners seek to create and maintain healthy, biodiverse ecosystems, because ecosystem health and plant health go hand-in-hand.

In this way organic gardening supports the ecological roles of plants and their allies the formation of organic molecules, the very foundation of life.

Organic gardening is not about substituting toxic chemicals with less toxic ones, but about a whole different way of thinking and working.

It is a conscious effort to cooperate with Nature in the creation of health and abundance for all.


We go much deeper into this topic in our online course, which you can discover here:

Ecological Plant Knowledge 2 - Ornamentals Online