By Steve K. Lloyd
Copyright © 2026
Share for Educational Use with Credit
From time to time, a reader will finish one of my articles and feel a frustration they don’t always name right away.
They were interested.
They learned something.
But they didn’t leave with a list.
No steps. No targets.
No final paragraph that says, “Do this next and you’ll be fine.”
That reaction makes sense. Gardening culture, especially in the internet age, has trained us to equate help with instruction. If a problem exists, there should be a fix. If a failure occurs, there should be a correction. If we understand something better, surely that understanding should translate into control.
Much of the time, that expectation is reasonable. Plants do respond to light, water, temperature, timing, and handling. Good technique matters. Experience matters. Observation matters.
But not all misunderstanding is procedural. Some misunderstandings are conceptual. And when those are wrong, better instructions don’t help. They just get layered on top of a faulty mental model.
That is the space where most of my writing lives. Much of it sits between explanation and instruction, where understanding matters even when it does not immediately translate into action.
I am less interested in telling growers what to do than in helping them understand what they are actually seeing. I want to slow the moment where frustration turns into self-blame, where a complex biological outcome gets flattened into a single word like “rot,” “failure,” or “mistake.”
Very often, the question I’m trying to answer is not “How do we prevent this?” but “Why does this keep behaving in ways our advice doesn’t explain?”
That distinction matters.
Why Advice Is What Readers Expect
In horticulture, we tend to assume that confusion means a lack of information. If something didn’t work, we look for a missing variable: wrong temperature, wrong mix, wrong timing, wrong product. The solution is more data, more precision, tighter control.
Sometimes that’s exactly right.
But sometimes the problem isn’t missing information. It’s an incorrect causal story.
When that happens, piling on more instructions can actually make things worse. It reinforces the belief that outcomes are fully controllable if we just try hard enough or follow the right recipe. When biology refuses to cooperate, the grower is left not only with a loss, but with the feeling that they failed to apply the rules correctly.
I don’t think that’s honest. And I don’t think it’s kind.
When Instructions Fail Because the Model Is Wrong
We want biology to be deterministic, where A plus B equals C. But plants operate in systems that are probabilistic. Timing matters in ways we cannot rewind. Some processes are initiated long before symptoms appear. Some failures unfold on biological schedules that ignore our intentions and calendars. Some outcomes are shaped by interactions we can influence, but not command.
This is why effort and outcome so often drift apart in practice, a theme I explore more directly in Nature vs. Nurture in Dahlias: Why Effort and Outcome Don’t Always Align. That essay looks at how biology resists clean cause-and-effect stories, even when growers do many things right.
Explaining that reality does not make me anti-advice. It makes me careful with it.
I write articles that focus on mechanism, sequence, and interpretation because those are the things most often missing from garden conversations. Without them, advice floats free of context and is easily mistaken for a guarantee.
That’s also why I resist checklists.
Checklists imply completeness. They imply that if you’ve done everything on the list, the outcome is secured. Biology doesn’t work that way. When advice is framed without its limits, it promises more than it can deliver.
I would rather offer fewer answers and make them honest than offer certainty I can’t support.
What Explanation Is Actually For
This approach does narrow my audience. I’m aware of that. Some readers want fast answers, guaranteed fixes, or reassurance that control is always possible. Those readers may find my work unsatisfying, or may skim it selectively. That’s okay.
The readers I’m writing for are usually already uneasy. They’ve done the work. They’ve followed the guidance. They’ve paid attention. And yet, something didn’t behave the way it was supposed to.
They don’t need another rule right away. They need a better explanation of what just happened.
If there’s a unifying theme across my work, it’s this: effort and outcome are related, but they are not the same thing. Understanding that difference is often more valuable than another attempt at control.
I don’t believe that gardeners are helped only when they are told what to do next. Sometimes they are helped when they stop blaming themselves for outcomes that were never fully under their control. Sometimes they are helped when a confusing experience is named, contextualized, and explained without being reduced to a mistake.
That kind of help doesn’t always feel immediately useful. It doesn’t convert well. It doesn’t resolve neatly. But it builds something slower and more durable: trust, discernment, and the ability to evaluate advice without turning it into a promise.
That’s the kind of help I’m interested in offering.
Not because I don’t care about results. I do. But because I care about honesty. And because I believe that growers deserve explanations that respect the complexity of the living systems they’re working with.
If you leave one of my articles without a to-do list but with a clearer understanding of why something unfolded the way it did, then it has done its job. Not because understanding replaces action, but because it changes how action is chosen and judged.
