A Master’s Thesis Retrospective

You are a young gardener in a far-off land who has just completed his time at Horace’s Horizonless School for Horticulturalists, a school for aspiring green thumbs located on the midwestern edge of the Forest of Knowledge, a vast expanse of gardens planted by horticulturalists from all over the world. The Forest of Knowledge is enormous, interconnecting, and so dense with centuries of gardens that it is often impossible for an untrained gardener to navigate.

After four years of studying at Horace’s, your thumb has started to turn a slight shade of chartreuse and you are now deciding the next step on your horticultural path. You consider going to join the workforce, perhaps trying to get a job at the local estate or the castle in the valley, but upon reflection feel that you’re not quite done with your education. Fortunately, Horace’s Horizonless School for Horticulturalists offers a Master Gardener program that allows you to extend your stay at Horace’s for another year.

Horace’s has a number of ways to obtain the title of Master Gardener, but you have grown bored of the greenhouse classes of the past four years, and decide to go with the third option:

Plant your own garden in the Forest of Knowledge

Few students ever plant full gardens while at Horace’s. They study plant morphology, water cycles, and the tools of the trade, and may even be given responsibility for a single small garden bed, but planting an entire garden is most often left to Master Gardeners, Doctors of Horticulture, and professors at Horace’s. But you decide that now is the time, and you want to plant your first garden. So, how do you do it?

In case the title of this post didn’t make it clear, this is not about how to plant a garden. In fact, if you’re actually planning on planting a garden, some of this advice could lead you astray, although I’ve done my best to stay true to real gardening methods. This post is about how to write a research paper and contribute to the wide and deep expanse of human knowledge, known here as the Forest of Knowledge. I’ve attempted to map each of the steps of writing a paper to the steps of planting a garden.

As previously mentioned, the Forest of Knowledge is not the kind of place you just wander into, and you can’t just plant a garden wherever you’d like. So a good gardener must first get a lay of the land; the most effective way to do this is by reading as many manuscripts written by other gardeners as you can. Sun and soil studies will tell you good places to plant your garden. Descriptions of other gardens will teach you how to plan yours. Perhaps you look for the most recently planted gardens, figuring that you might be able to plant one that nicely complements them. Or maybe you’re inspired by much older, abandoned gardens, thinking that a new garden near them might revitalize that part of the Forest.

(This process is the background research and literature review portion of writing a thesis. Just like examining other gardens, your research will both show you what parts of your field are ripe for new ideas and give you new ideas to work with, as well as teach you what the best practices are in your field.)

The important part is that you don’t enter the Forest without studying other gardens. In fact, you don’t even start planning your garden until you’re confident you can describe what grove you’re going to plant your garden in, and how the surrounding landscape looks. This way, you know whether your garden is going to fit in, whether it will complement the surrounding gardens, and (perhaps most importantly) whether your garden is actually going to add anything new to the area you’re planting in.

Once you’ve decided where you’re going to plant your garden, it’s time to…

All of this manuscript reading has hopefully left you with a good idea of what kind of plants are and aren’t viable in the area you’re going to grow your garden. So you carefully select your seeds, deciding which plants you’re going to try growing.

(Your seeds are your hypotheses; alone, they are nothing, but with patience, care, and thought, will become the core of your paper.)

Now seed selection was an art taught at Horace’s, but rarely practiced. So, you’re told that you shouldn’t get too attached to any particular seed, because the next step is…

It’s now time to discover which seeds will bear fruit (literally). You must go to your selected plot of land and carefully and lovingly plant each type of seed. The Master Gardeners and Doctors of Horticulture can plant several seeds at a time and track all of them, but as a Master Gardener in-training, you only plant a few seeds at a time.

(This is the process of testing your hypotheses, seeing which work, which don’t, and which will provide the basis for your paper.)

Now, for some bad news: your first seed will die. Your second one will probably die, too.

This is almost inevitable, and few gardeners pick the right seed on the first go, including the professors. But you soldier on, planting seed after seed, watering them, watching them (hopefully) grow saplings, and recording what did and didn’t work. After much effort and toil, you find a family of seeds that takes to the ground. Clutching it carefully in your hands, you proceed to…

Ok, you’ve read the manuscripts, you’ve selected the seeds, you’ve tested their viability. Now you can finally start laying out your garden. You can decide which way it will face, how many boxes you’ll plant, whether you need to irrigate. Ideally, you’ll be able to lay out almost the entire garden before you plant a single seed. More likely, however, is that you’ll have to change some things about the layout once things have started to grow.

(This is your outline. Hopefully you’ll get the gist of your paper down in one go. Probably you won’t. But an outline gives you a plan to deviate from.)

But once you have a garden plan, you can…

This one is simple: water the plants. Water them regularly.

Admittedly some plants will need to be watered daily, some weekly. Some will need more water, some will need less. But all of them will need to be watered on a regular basis.

Let me be clear: this is the step where many gardeners falter. They fail to water regularly, or perhaps fail to water at all, and end up with a garden that is not quite as vibrant as they may have hoped. So, to stress again, water the plants regularly.

(Watering is writing. Some writing will need to be done daily, some weekly. Some parts will need more writing, some will need less. But if you don’t write regularly, you’re going to have a bad time. Write regularly.)

If you do, you’ll see bright shoots coming up as you water, and eventually it will be time to…

As your garden starts to grow, you’ll inevitably start to see the enemy of every horticulturalist: weeds. Pesky plants that come up out of your garden; sometimes they are from an old seed you planted that you thought had died, or sometimes they’re from a neighboring garden that threatens to invade. Either way, these weeds must be removed, both for aesthetics but also, and more importantly, to let the intended plants grow to be strong and healthy.

It is critical, however, that you do not weed your garden too early. By weeding early, you run the risk of pulling the plants you wanted. This problem is all-too-common, and can be difficult even for the experts of the horticultural craft; distinguishing what is an intended plant and what is a weed is near-impossible. What’s more, there are rare occasions when what looks like a weed is actually a late-blooming plant. By waiting to weed, you can help yourself avoid pulling plants that should stay in the garden.

The other goal of weeding is to thin a garden. Seeds which once appeared to work well may turn out to be invasive, threatening to take over the garden. Some seeds can crowd out others, reducing the available sunlight and water and making the entire garden less vibrant. By waiting until real growth has started to show, you can also decide what parts of the garden to thin, allowing the most beautiful or delicious plants to have more resources and become the centerpieces of the garden.

(Weeding is how you edit your paper. Just like weeding, editing serves a variety of purposes, and can’t be done too early. Write first, edit later. Plant first, weed later.)

Weeding is one way to make a healthier garden, but often the best way is to…

Once your garden has some healthy growth, and you’ve weeded what you can, it’s time to bring in more gardeners. Family members (if they’re in the horticultural profession), mentors, and advisors are particularly good candidates to bring in, as they can help you figure out which plants to keep or not keep, which beds to re-plant, or how best to water the plants. These experienced eyes can help take your garden from a nice place to sit for a minute to a serious contribution to the Forest of Knowledge that will draw attention from the surrounding area.

(Get other people to look at your work! This is as true in real gardening as it is in writing, or art or music or engineering or any other endeavor. Exposing your work to other minds will do nothing but strengthen it; just be sure that you choose people you trust to give constructive and loving feedback, and be ready for some well-deserved criticism.)

That’s it! In seven not-so-easy steps, that’s how to plant a garden in the Forest of Knowledge. Regardless of whether you aced every step or stumbled along the way, it’s important to remember that the simple act of planting a garden is an impressive feat to be proud of, and that few gardeners ace their first garden.