It's not rocket science

I was hiking near the Fiery Gizzard trail (Grundy/Marion County TN) a few weekends back and saw a small tree growing with a rock. On this heavily used trail, a 4 inch caliper young tree (umbrella magnolia) had emerged from the edge of a sloping trail, and much of its base had grown around a 6 inch chunk of rock.
This is a trail used heavily by people, and on its own this tree was reaching up towards the canopy, for the sunlight, and reaching down into the soil for its nutrition sources and water. The rock looked completely embedded as the base of the tree had grown around it.
No problem.
The natural world, Mother Nature, pretty much takes care of business without much help from us.

Horticulture is the meeting of humans and plants, specifically, humans growing and manipulating flora.
It' s not rocket science but it is science. The size of particles in soil components, the concentration of hydrogen ions in soil, the response of plants photoreceptors to the length of daylight hours, these things determine plant outcomes. Left alone nature will takes care of a lot of things. The ecological processes in a woodland or field create natural soil nutrition, appropriate lighting conditions, rain fall variation, seed dispersal. In ornamental horticulture (a.k.a. gardening and landscaping) we manipulate nature quite a bit.

We ask shady plants to grow in sun, we ask alkaline loving plants to grow in acid soils, we plant things in really small patches of soil, or even containers and deny them the insulation and moisture retention capacity of a natural soil environment. We plant seed where we want , not just where the wind or birds leave them, we over-mulch..... and they still perform a lot of the time.

It is helpful then, to support our plants as much as we can afford the time and money. Supplemental fertilizer is helpful in certain constrained environments. Supplemental water is certainly an option ...we trade all this for the beauty given us, for the satisfaction of creating a certain space. But let's trust the plants to take care of themselves a bit too.

I am trying to point out that in ornamental plant environments it is good to create beauty, but lets first care for the health of the plant, primarily giving it a great soil environment, then think about what it is not getting in these manipulated environments and give it fertilizer, soil corrections, pruning for health and beauty etc., but then...lets just let the plants do their thing. They might really impress us.

April showers...

It's really great all the rain we're having. Great start to spring planting and rebuilding our soil moisture. So are we back to normal,or still in a drought?
It's all relative I guess. Over a 12-24 month average we're below normal on rainfall. Over a few months we are average here in Tennessee, although some parts of East Tennessee are officially still in a drought.

http://www.drought.gov/portal/server.pt/community/drought_indicators/us_drought_monitor

So if you're planting new shrubs and trees or vegetables, rely on the rainfall but do additional watering if the rainfall is below 1-2 inches per week (How to know: local weather news on t.v. usually tells us the rainfall measure). Better to water deeply, slowly - leave the hose on a trickle for an hour- once a week than sprinkling a few minutes daily.