 |
| Unidentified rose from my garden, possibly Roseraie de L'Hay |
Now
is the time to appreciate roses. Pay court to Her Royal Highness, La Reine des Violettes. Or sit, if you dare, beneath a Rambling Rector. But wait until the
evening, when old roses are at their most expansive, posing in mixed borders,
or lolling over fences. Get close to a prickly old beauty, and inhale.
Henry Cecil, the legendary race-horse trainer, grew roses. When he had visitors to
his stables at Warren Place, Cecil liked to show them his roses first. He knew
all their names and habits, but he didn’t do any of the digging. Cecil had the
same approach to growing roses, as he had to training race-horses. He knew what
wanted, and he made suggestions. Cecil liked to win, and he knew how to get results by working through others.
Good
growers and difficult deaths
I
once had a garden with old roses, the prickly kind, with purple heads, and
grey-tinged leaves. Unlike Cecil, I did all my own digging and pruning. I
collected horse-manure in black plastic bags from urban stables. Friends, who
knew about these things, said the horse-manure was not yet mature; warned me
that it would burn the roses if allowed to come in contact with the stems. I
put it on, anyhow. What I enjoyed was watching the roses grow, and flower, and
fade. Each day there would be something new to see and admire, or fret about.
Some roses look better when they are giving up the ghost. Others, like
Albertine, don’t die well. After Albertine has flowered, the rose-heads stick
around on the branches, and turn a stubborn brown.
Acting
a bit sniffy
Since
I moved house, I have had to rely on other people’s gardens for a rose
fix. I want to be amazed, but even in the red velvet presence of a William Lobb, I feel indifferent. These roses are nothing to me. They are not yet in bloom, or they have just ‘gone over’. And even
when the flowers are in peak condition, the perfume is pathetic, and the petals
are too pink. None of the specimens in other people’s gardens makes me
speechless.
Never knowingly overestimated
Why
am I insensible to other people’s flowers? Is it a question of ownership? Something clicked, when, along with
500 others, I went to hear Rolf Dobelli talking about his book ‘The Art of Thinking Clearly’. Rolf was charming, modest and immediately disarming. He said
he never expected so many people to come. According to Rolf, it is much more
common that we overestimate our knowledge than we underestimate it. Rolf is debonair. Swiss, he could pass for Italian, any day. In his book, Rolf
describes different types of ‘bias’. For example, someone we know sets up their
own business, and does extremely well. Because they are like us, we
overestimate our chances of doing the same thing. We forget that most start-ups
fail within a few years. Rolf calls this ‘Survivorship Bias’.
Now
that Rolf has implanted the idea of bias in my mind, I think I may be suffering
from ‘Ownership Bias’. Parents dote on their children, and people with pets –
in my experience – are just as bad. So it is with me, and the roses that I have
grown. Having prepared the soil, planted, fed, and pruned a rose, not to mention
the hours spent tying back an unruly climber, I may well overestimate their good points. Naturally, I am amazed when a rose that I have grown
flowers for the first time. I wonder if Henry Cecil suffered from ‘Ownership
Bias’? Or did he just need to find a use for all that horse-manure? I think
I’ll write to Rolf about this. I am sure he will be interested.
23 June 2103
Thanks for reading my blog. If you liked this page, you might like to check out my business website which has more content on leadership and learning.
www.kellowlearning.com
