Read by Michael Flamel

I tell myself there are two kinds of gardeners: those who start their own seeds and those who don’t.

Now I’m not knocking buying seedlings or full-grown plants for that matter. Every gardener does. There’re lots of good reasons to buy some or all of your garden plants. For one thing, starting seeds means killing seedlings. It means playing plant executioner as much as plant mother.

I’m not kidding. Let’s assume for the moment that you’re like me: sort of the error-prone type. How do I kiss off seedlings? I can’t count the ways. Underwatering—sometimes missing just one day is all it takes. Overwatering—there’s a quick way to bring on horticultural crib death. Not enough light. Not enough heat. Overfertilizing. Underfertilizing. And on and on.

Each time I make one of these gardening boners, more of my skinny-stemmed starts turn around and head right back from where they came. I can sow 100 lettuce seeds in trays in early February and by the middle of March end up setting less than a dozen little seedlings outside in the soil.

But suppose you are a really good gardener. Suppose every one of your home-reared plants thrives. Well, nobody needs 100 lettuce starts or an entire gardenful of chives or marigolds. So, you end up deliberately doing on the back end what you didn’t accidentally do on the front. You thin, cull, compost, throw away—that’s right, knock off the plants you don’t want.

For years, that bothered me. I felt guilty. No matter whether I raised seedlings well or poorly, I ended up killing half or even three-quarters of the sprouts I grew. But then I got to thinking. How many newborn sea turtles, scratching their way across the sand to the sea, live to adulthood? How many tadpoles grow up to catch flies on a Summer night? An oak tree drops 4,000 acorns in an average year. How many even sprout? (Less than 40.)

Starting seeds reminds me that gardening is closer to real life than it is to how-to books. That death and life are close siblings, sometimes like twins, arriving seconds apart. That gardening, unlike bowling or bicycling, is not recreational. It’s creational. That playing God with plants is a burden as well as a blessing.

If there’re two kinds of gardeners, plant buyers and seed starters, I choose to be the latter. After all, how else can you discover all the lessons, waiting and ready to sprout, in a tiny packet of seeds? ❖