When I was a kid, no one in my family was a gardener. None of my roommates or house mates were gardeners, nor any of us when I grew up and had a family. So I never learned much in the way of 'the rules'. I learned the hard way it's best to get to know a new location before changing things. Planting a maple sapling in the dry dust of a limestone hill in the heat of central Texas didn't work well; the maple lasted about a month.