A Spot of Amateur Gardening

The balcony is three feet by six feet of optimism overlooking a car park. This is where you've decided to become self-sufficient. Some seek self-sufficiency in the wilderness. Others, a windowsill.
Here sits the basil you've sworn to keep alive, next to the mint that's spreading in uneven clumps and the rosemary that judges your cooking. What is the difference, really, between kitchen scissors and secateurs? And is ‘partial shade’ not a somewhat subjective condition? In any case, whatever your watering strategy is, it’s wrong. Before you have even begun you should know that it is wrong.
Plants, it turns out, are brutally honest about attention. They cannot be charmed or negotiated with. They demand consistency from people who can barely remember to water themselves.
Thus, in the democracy of dirt, the person coaxing tomatoes from a cracked pot participates in the same miracle as the estate gardener with her rolling lawns. Both are asking the earth to trust them. Both are learning that cultivation begins not with knowledge but with the willingness to begin again each morning, secateurs or scissors in hand, hope intact.