Thoughts on history, culture, music, the details of our world, and how learning matters. Written by a musician and professor, Learn with Mike provides insight and resources for those looking to maximize their creative potential through developing the skill of learning. Also posts from On Learning Percussion, my more practical posts about musical learning that I hope are helpful for curious learners.
It’s May. With commencement approaching here at Arizona State, I’m embodying a reflective mode.
I’m recently returned from the premiere of Eliza Brown’s The Listening Year at Big Walnut Creek, an evening-length work blending field recordings composer Eliza Brown made over a year of visits to Big Walnut Creek with judicious cello and percussion parts. Eliza calls the project “
The Listening Year at Big Walnut Creek is a sound art project that explores the changing sonic ecology of a place,” and it was a joy to help bring this work to life at Depauw University, among a supportive and curious community.
I’ve been devoting time to my Learning Percussion newsletter, articulating my thoughts on productivity, practicing, and percussion.
With the end of the semester, I’m reflecting on a school year where I tried to dial in learning outcomes, assessments and rubrics for the study of percussion within a university whose mission is radical inclusivity. This year, we worked on embedding best-practice learning strategies within the percussion percussion studio, focusing on time management, leveraging cognitive neurology for maximal efficiency in the practice room, and diminishing performance anxiety through conscious observation, analysis, and action.
Throughout, though, there has been one constant: Gardeners’ World.
Gardener’s World is a BBC gardening show that has become an obsession. The search to answer why has gotten me thinking about learning, expertise, and seasonality in creative work, and I wanted to share those thoughts.
Gardeners’ World has been on since 1968, but has entered my life in recent years. The show airs weekly, with timely information for UK gardeners on that week’s gardening tasks, field trips to gardens across the country and interviews with expert horticulturists and single plants, species. In recent years, the show has shown viewers taking on their own gardening challenges, and offers practical tips for gardeners’ confronting climate change.
The show’s most recent host is Monty Don, the sartorially-enlightened steward of Longmeadow, a multi-acre homestead in Herefordshire that Monty transformed from barren fields to a majestic tour de force of plants, spanning a Cottage Garden, a Jewel Garden, a Paradise Garden, and a Vegetable Garden , a wildlife pond pond, an orchard, a number of yew cones, a writing garden, what seems like several acres of compost, and two beautiful dogs, who do NOT seem that interested in Monty’s Gardening.
Why do I like this show so much? Is it Monty’s winsome, contagious calmness? His arsenal of tools? The dog content? The extremely high-def rendering of plants? The window into the lives of Monty’s team of correspondents? The fact that I don’t know where any of these locations are? The straight-faced deployment of paragraphs of latin plant names? I think it’s because Monty is teaching us something about learning, history, and music. Specifically how we learn, make, and share music.
Developing and Using Expertise
One truism of learning is that strong mental models (the key to expertise, knowledge and skill) developed through active creation, modeling, and tinkering.
On Gardeners’ World, we see elite expertise, wrapped in delightful British obliqueness. Each week viewers are introduced to people who know a LOT about plants. But many of the characters don’t know a lot about a lot of plants. They know a lot about the proclivities and needs of ONE plant: they hold the national collection of Dahlia’s, have raised thousands of lithops, or have cultivated the same species of tree for 50 years. We’re also introduced to gardeners with extreme skill, whose propagation techniques allow for many-fold increase in plant yields. And some gardeners are experts in certain spaces. Monty is exhibit A here: he rarely leaves his beloved Longmeadow, save for exceptional vistas, such as July 8 2021’s visit to the longest herbaceous border in the world (at Kew Gardens)
It IS pretty long!
These gardeners’ accrued experience, knowledge and skill has resulted in tremendously rich mental representations for their specialized plants, gardens, or climates. And, I cannot get enough of Gardeners’ World’s hyper specific and not-necessarily-applicable advice. Despite dwelling in the desert, I can now can opine on deadheading Dahlias (do it!), adding grit to compost to facilitate drainage, pruning (roses: prune back hard, hydrangias: there are two kinds with opposite pruning methods for some reason), encouraging wildlife with judicious creation of ponds (not really possible in AZ), planting espalier trees—45 degrees is the key angle!— and a LOT about grapes and Monty’s obsession with growing them in the UK.
But, what piques my interested the most about Gardeners’ World is its focus on how expertise is USED, specifically how strong mental models help gardeners thrive without immediate feedback and adjust their knowledge to their own gardening circumstance.
Monty looking for the right plant in the right place
Right plant, right place
One might think that practitioners of a field with an immense body of historical and biological knowledge—humans have been messing with plants for a long time—would be rigid, erring on the side of established practice.
That is not the case. Even though horticultural enthusiasts know a lot about what should happen with their plants in their gardens, they prioritize what is happening in their gardens, how soil, wind, microclimates, pollinators all impact what they can grow.
Because they are so familiar with their gardens, gardeners are experts in climate change. you can’t grow what you used to, so get over it , and Gardeners’ World’s lesson is definitely “get over it” — so many sequences on the show are visiting gardens in an attempt to learn what GB’s changing gardens will be like. At the same time, the expertise of Monty’s cast of rogues allow them to adjust their work from an idealized circumstance to the reality of their own gardens. And sometimes that leads to exceptions.
There’s a real lesson for musicians here. As performers, we strive for dynamic and communicative performances. It’s essential to know something about original performance practice, what Mozart’s music might have sounded like in his lifetime, but it’s our duty as performers to adjust, to bring a piece of music to life in a way that communicates to our own milieu. It’s nice to know that typically plant X needs Y, but perhaps in our community plant X grows the best with Z. Likewise, as a professor coming to the end of a semester, watching Gardeners’ World has been a good reminder to teach the students I have, not the students I wish I had. Right Plant Right Place means to address the students we’re working with, not hoping that our cottage garden is suddenly a tropical island.
The Process
“I’ll check back on this every month, and in three years it might be great” is not something a classical musician wants to hear from a teacher or coach. But it’s a best practice in gardening. Plants take time to develop, and doing too much to improve them too quickly actually messes them up, as my over-watered cacti can attest. The best gardeners and musicians fall in love with the process. Does’t this experience rhyme with musical development, where results are often a lagging indicator of work?
But, musicians and gardeners don’t necessarily become more patient. They allow the long-term goals to be led by the joy of day to day learning and discovery. It’s remarkable how much a single garden can change in a month, a week, or even a day. And that measuring of short-term, small-scale change is essential to the habits of creative practice that we try to active as musicians. It sits somewhere between frustration and joy, between experimentation and systems or habits.
Musicians can take inspiration from Gardeners’ World that creative work is also seasonal. We plant the seeds of a project, water them, incubate them, then harvest those ideas before using those ideas to plant new projects. Plants and projects need to incubate, and this incubation period tends to be where the best ‘happy accidents’ happen. One might have multiple projects in seasons at one time, but we can’t rush those seasons, harvesting before the ideas are ready, or planting before the soil has been prepared. (While, with the exception of Concert Season Announcement Season, most musical tasks can be undertaken at any time of the year, so here I’m mostly referrring to how how there are times within each project to undertake each task.)
Gardening is seasonal, and this urgency is represented in Monty’s ”Jobs for the Weekend,” which highlights time sensitive tasks for each week of the year. Lest you think musicians have the market cornered on specificity, here are some of my favorite, most #relatable jobs for the weekend :
Support Autumn-Fruiting Raspberries (2014, episode 16):
Potting Up Dahlia Tubers in Early Spring (2017, episode 2)
Lifting and Storing Dahlia Tubers (2021, episode 28)
Deadheading Dahlias (2020, episode 21)
Pinching Out Dahlia Tips (2020, episode 8
There are a lot of tips about Dahlias…
Turning the Compost
Working for the habits of creativity rather than the results can lead to some interesting and powerful results.
Each week, Monty broadcasts at least once from his potting shed, where his carefully arranged compost sifters hang like paella pans and his spades are ready to do battle with the toughest leaf mold. By my standards, Monty deploys a LOT of compost while potting, ranging from pure compost to leaf mold to grit, to vermiculite, each carefully shoveled like Garrett’s popcorn into a plastic or terra cotta container to be seeded, labeled, watered in, and left in one of the many germinating spots in Longmeadow.
At times, Monty shows us his complex compositing arrangement, which gradually breaks down garden waste into highly nutritious soil. It strikes me that the composting process is a handy analogy for musical learning and practice. Detritus, material no longer immediately useful, is allowed to incubate, becoming the basis for future growth. Composting takes time. Learning takes time and is circuitous…
Obsessions
If you made it this far, you might be like me! I like Gardeners’ World for the same reason I like Chef Wang, niche catalogs, and talking to docents at obscure art museums. Nothing is more interesting than someone who is interested in something. And despite his general passion for all plants, Monty displays a supernatural interest in a few unlikely domains of British gardening. They’re worth exploring:
I. Grapes
For as long as I’ve watched the show, Monty has been trying to grow the perfect grapes. Once in a while, we visit him in his greenhouse, where he carefully, assiduously cultivates bundles fit for Bacchus. He even visits a grape cultivator to pick the perfect species for his future endeavors. He carefully grows the branches around the shape of his greenhouse, and then assiduously prunes both the branches (regular secateurs) and the grapes (I think he’s using a nose hair trimmer for this!?)
Here, Monty demonstrates how to overwinter bananas, particularly insetti banana. Wait, not the Musa basjoo banana, which you cna leave outside if you build…a fleece Wigwam around it? British gardeners are weird.
It’s a real journey. Monty pulls the root through an Edwardian-era door, eschews the ridiculous number of terra cotta pots behind him to dump the banana roots into a plastic bag filled carefully with a mix of ordinary compost + 50% leaf mold, then endeavors to keep it between 5 and 12 degrees to hibernate it, describing his plan to gradually introduce it to heat until April. He learns from last year’s mistake of leaving the banana in the green house (too warm, banana grew too much) and decides to keep the stub in his tool shed. Just wow.
Other Things I’m Liking
Speaking of Niche Information, I’m liking two insider-focused competitions right now:
Ideal Electrician National Championship
Sponsored by IDEAL tools, the National Electrician Championship asks professional electricians to solve a common problem, live! Here’s an example challenge:
I love watching these pros bend pipes, take notes, eschew the standard operating procedures, and try to use tiny pencils while wearing giant gloves.
sample challenge
Excel world championships
The Microsoft Excel World Championship challenges competitors to solve unusual data-based problems. “It transforms a common office tool into a dynamic sport.” I’m in. One competition was four hours and forty-five minutes long, but I was captivated with how the competitors deployed keyboard shortcuts I never knew existed, filling, slicing and dicing arrays like madmen. I love that they walk in like professional wrestlers.
If you run an incredibly specific competition and would like someone to comment, call me!
Speaking of commentary, one of my favorite parts of the Monty Don experience is his color commentary on his gardening, often offered with extremely specific, #relatable advice advice like “when you’re potting on agapanthus, one needs to remember…” or “the thing about overwintering a mango is that…” I would LOVE a TV show where elite musicians narrate their practice sessions, articulating what they are hearing and how they hope to address their issues, and evaluating recordings of their performances.
This one is from Frankfurt (spelled Frankfort back in 1928), with travel time in hours to a variety of destinations. I love how some locations are “off the map”
And here’s one from Indianapolis in 1907, diagramming passenger rail and interurban streetcars. This map proves that “one fourth the population of the US is within a radius of three hundred miles of Indianapolis.” Woe to those who want to reach St. Louis: you’ve have to transfer in Brazil or Terre Haute. I like the implication that the reader would spin the map around on the table, like the score to Stockhausen’s Refrain.
Thoughts on history, culture, music, the details of our world, and how learning matters. Written by a musician and professor, Learn with Mike provides insight and resources for those looking to maximize their creative potential through developing the skill of learning. Also posts from On Learning Percussion, my more practical posts about musical learning that I hope are helpful for curious learners.
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