How does your garden grow?

I have always been a gardener, being initiated into the symbiotic world of earthworms and shasta daisies by my mother when I was about five years old. She began at an early age as well, growing up in the family farm where they planted rice, corn, tropical fruit trees and vegetables in southern Philippines, in a small town by the sea. My mother taught me a lot about gardening, such as how to propagate African violets by rooting leaf cuttings in water and how to prepare a foliar fertiliser solution for her orchids. But more importantly, without even knowing it, she introduced me to the periodic table of elements – 21 of them, anyway.

The first two elements every gardener knows about are hydrogen and oxygen. I have a rocky relationship with the power couple H₂O. It has the ability to make my limp and under-hydrated Fittonia spring back to life but it also has the ability to bring a slow and dreadful death by root rot, especially prevalent during the winter months.