In Defense of Amateurism

What I know about gardening I've learned largely from personal experience, informed by conversations with other gardeners and the occassional book or online article. I'd wager that the sum total of my horticultural knowledge is less than what one could acquire in a semester of graduate school. I am a rank amateur.

The internet is full of swaggering amateurs and know-nothings making ill-informed proclamations and confidenly asserting faleshoods. They give amateurism a bad name. And if my purpose in writing these posts was to offer practical suggestions about how to garden, I would be just as guilty. I want to make a case for amateurism, but not the kind that dominates our social media. You see, if we are overrun with amateurs, we also have a problem with experts.

To be more precise, we have a problem with how we deal with expertise. I'm actually all in favor of real expertise. As a society, we need to listen more to scientists, historians, philosophers, artists and poets. Our failure to give expertise its due is part of the same societal pathology that celebrates the know-nothings. But along with failing to listen to experts where it matters, we sometimes give experts too much credence in areas where it doesn't.

Where we could afford to listen less to expertise is in the myriad ways we conduct our personal lives. Too often, we automatically defer to experts rather than listen to our own guts, our own needs and desires. For example, most of us know parents who can't be spontaneous with their children because they're overwhelmed by the advice of books or mommy blogs. Or people who are too overwhelmed by the meals or interiors they see on HGTV to ever attempt serious cooking or redecorating on their own. We are collectively guilty of a learned helplessness in the face of these kinds of experts.

This learned helplessness serves capitalism well. If we don't trust our own abilities or take joy in our own efforts, we are far more likely to pay someone else to do our work or buy consumer products that are surrogates for our own creative invention. Only by embracing our amateurism and being willing to fail can we undertake the creative exploration through which life offers its greatest satisfactions.

My point in blogging about my garden is not to proclaim my abilities as a gardener—they're negligible. Nor is it to celebrate what is really a very ordinary garden plot. Rather it is to celebrate the effort itself, the joy that comes from intense engagement in a project that takes me outside of my own head and connects me to the abundant natural world in a tiny urban garden plot. If I was ashamed of my amateurism, I would be paralyzed by fear and doubt. By embracing it I can keep trying, keep failing forward, and ever so slowly trading little bits of amateurism for little bits of hard-won expertise. Even so, the expertise isn't the point. The journey is.