People ask me what books they should read to learn about plants, and I feel like I need to be honest with you and say that the way I learnt about plants was by getting some and then just dealing with whatever problems they have

I do have a lot of books on herbalism etc hanging around for reference, but I don't really learn anything that way. I learnt about rust fungi because somewhere along the line, my plants got rust fungi. I'm comfortable being wrong and not knowing everything before I begin.

So many people are scared of killing their plants, so they want to study beforehand or avoid unfamiliar species altogether. But death is unavoidable in a garden if you want to grow anything past a season. You have to get used to seeing things wither, and not taking it personally.

I feel this is partly why cacti are so popular. They appear constant, low-maintanence, and undramatic in death. But even with cacti, eventually you'll have to amputate rot to save the whole. Sacrifice, death and failure are part of growing things. You can't avoid them by reading.

As if to prove my own point, I just had to clip two rosebuds because of budworm. I didn't know what budworm was until it actually happened to my own roses. If I left it, nothing would bloom and it'd all be eaten by caterpillars. It's wild out there and you have to be wild too.