How NOT to be a Fabulous Gardener (Part 2)
Hello and welcome to the second instalment of How not to be a Fabulous Gardener! If you’ve just stumbled across this post and haven’t read Part 1 of How not to be a Fabulous Gardener, you can find it here.
I hope these suggestions help you to avoid getting sidetracked/overwhelmed by the mass of highly specific gardening advice peppered all over the internet, letting you focus on more general principles that really will help your garden! Now, where were we…
5. Label things as ‘bad’ or ‘good’
This is pretty much the best thing you can do if you want to add lots of unnecessary stress, frustration, confusion and unhappiness to your time in the garden. And the real bummer is that this is one of those things that garden advice columns throw at people ALL THE TIME. I guess it makes for good lists and gives a general impression of authority.
These pages will tell you that there are good plants and there are bad plants. Weeds are ‘bad plants’ and flowers that you dutifully tend to are ‘good plants’…Unless they start to grow rampant too, and then…do they turn into bad plants as well? What about the ‘weeds’ that pop up randomly but aren’t actually all that invasive? What if they attract pollinators? What if you just…like them?? Then there are ‘good insects’ and ‘bad insects’. Apparently butterflies are good, but cabbage moths are bad. Wasps and bees are good…unless they bite you. Slaters help digest organic matter, improving your soil… which is…good…but then they eat your corn seedlings… so what are they??
The problem with this way of viewing your garden is that it is so black and white. It reduces a complex, integrated and flexible ecological system into two categories, instructing you to remove the bad and encourage the good. Well, as far as I’m concerned there is no such thing as good or bad in any garden. It is just what it is. Cabbage moths do eat my brassicas, sometimes. In springtime they float above the garden like white confetti. They lay eggs on the undersides of leaves and tiny green caterpillars hatch. The caterpillars are the colour of apples and their skin is fuzzy like a baby apricot. They nibble little holes in the leaves of my broccoli and then at some point, without me even noticing, they vanish. I guess some grow up and turn into white cabbage moths and - I assume - some become dinner for the wasps, willy wagtails, silvereyes and wattlebirds that visit the garden. They disappear over winter, and their reappearance is one of the first signs that spring is approaching. To label them as ‘bad’ captures none of this. And it doesn’t even begin to account for the fact that without the cabbage moths, many other animals in the garden would go hungry and would stop visiting. The thing that is truly ‘good’ in terms of the insects in your garden is diversity. Insect and wildlife diversity in your garden is the best form of ‘pest’ control on offer, and allowing it to take place without human intervention will lead to a much richer, more complex, interesting and beautiful garden. Encouraging insect diversity is easy - just plant a wide variety of different plants, and don’t use any pesticides or herbicides.
The same goes for so-called ‘weeds’. There are a handful of invasive introduced species that I wouldn’t plant in the garden because it goes against government recommendations. Aside from those, everything is fair game. If I’ve left a patch of earth empty long enough for a ‘weed’ to sow seeds and germinate there I think it’s earned its spot in the garden. A much nicer label for these ‘weeds’ is Pioneer Plants; species that are so tough and resilient they are generally the first to colonise an empty patch of soil (which would be inhospitable to most other species). By growing in these empty gaps in your garden, weeds help to shield the soil from harsh sunlight, their roots improve the soil structure and their flowers attract pollinators to your garden. Weeds with long tap roots (like dandelions) can help to aerate compacted soil, Oxalis rosea is a beautiful pink clover-like plant that attracts butterflies and Purslane helps shield dry, sandy soil from the sun and prevents erosion. Incidentally, both Purslane and Dandelions are edible; you can eat the leaves of the purslane plant (they taste a bit like baby spinach), and the petals of dandelions can be tossed through salads. It goes without saying that you must make 100% sure what you’re growing actually IS what you think it is before you eat it - one plant in particular looks a lot like Purslane but has a milky white and toxic sap, so if in any doubt, don’t eat the weed!! But, once you are confident that you can correctly identify these plants, is it even fair to call them weeds at all?? They improve the soil, add colour to your garden and contribute to your dinner. Not especially ‘bad’ in my books!
This is a very long winded way of saying that good and bad labels in the garden achieve nothing except to make us feel more stressed and like there is something that needs ‘fixing’, when 9 out of 10 times the only thing that needs to change is our definition of what a garden should be. The natural world isn’t perfect. It’s a thrumming, thriving ecosystem where everything is constantly getting eaten by something else. If you’re looking for confirmation that you are a fabulous gardener, don’t look to the pristine lettuce leaf, or the ‘pest free’ garden bed. The true sign that you have created something beautiful and wild is that millions of other tiny animals have decided to share the space with you. People might come to your garden and tell you it’s beautiful and what a good job you’ve done. But the dove that builds its nest in your backyard every spring, the wasps that drink from your pond and the frog that - very occasionally - deigns to grace you with his presence, these are the ones whose opinions really matter.
Instead of worrying that something has eaten a few holes in your lettuce, consider this: if your garden wasn’t healthy, vibrant and full of life, you wouldn’t have anything there to share your lettuce with in the first place. My advice? Stop researching ‘neem oil’ and ‘what to do about cabbage moths’ right this second, grab yourself a few of the un-nibbled leaves, make this salad, and give yourself a pat on the back for creating a place that supports the lives of literally thousands of other creatures. THAT, is the work of a spectacular gardener.
6. Plant aspirational plants that ignore your seasons, climate & environment
If you really don’t want to be a fabulous gardener, exhaust yourself by determinedly planting plants that are not suited to where you live. Whack azaleas in full sun and parched, alkaline soil. Plant succulents in shaded and muddy earth. Attempt to grow avocados in a region that gets deep winter frosts and then, when the azaleas are dead twigs, the succulents have turned to damp rotten sludge and the avocado has dropped every single brown leaf into the snow, chastise yourself for having black thumbs.
Oprah said “You can have it all. Just not all at once”. Well, as far as your garden goes, you can’t have it all. Ha! Sorry.
Ok maybe that’s not true. I guess you can have it all, it just takes a LOT of complicated struggle and honestly, I don’t think it’s worth it. Monty Don grows bananas in the UK and every autumn he has to dig them up and put them in his greenhouse so the snow doesn’t kill them. My dear ol’ mum (hi Mum!!) watches the weather forecast for imminent frosts and then wraps blankets around her avocado trees to protect them from the cold. People build hothouses to grow orchids in chilly, dry climates and struggle repeatedly in futile attempts to keep cacti alive in wet, cold places. And in a way I love it, because all of these gardeners are throwing caution to the wind and taking every effort to grow an irrationally huge variety of plants. But sometimes - particularly if you’re just beginning your garden - it’s much better simply to play to your strengths. Our planet is home to a huge range of environmental conditions, and something has evolved to fill almost every single one. This means, wherever you are on the planet (provided you don’t live in, like, the Arctic Circle or the Dead Sea), SOMETHING is perfectly adapted to thrive.
At this point, I have to acknowledge that if I were actually following my own advice my garden would be full of Australian natives that don’t require constant reticulation and are built to survive our insane, arid summers. And I wouldn’t be about to put a potted peony in the fridge for the next 6 months to trick it into thinking it’s living through an English winter. But hey, if we all heeded our own advice the world would be a very well-balanced, functional and boring place. I figure there’s a happy medium. Once something dies in my garden despite my best attempts I generally take it as a sign that it’s not meant to be. And I don’t (usually) beat myself up about it. Notice what’s working in your garden and what isn’t. Celebrate the success stories, research other varieties of those species - or plants that grow in similar regions - and plant more of those. If it thrives, keep it, propagate it and fill your garden with plants that really want to be there. The secret to having green thumbs really isn’t anything special - all plants want to grow, it’s just about finding the ones that want to grow in the environment you’re able to give them. Get plants that match your environment and your garden will be verdant, no matter the colour of your thumbs.
7. Take from the garden without giving back
Ok. Last suggestion for less-than-fabulous gardening. Take from the garden and give nothing back. Pull up vegetables and eat them, without replenishing the soil. Rip out old petunias and toss them in your green waste bin instead of back into the garden bed. Pick flowers before the bees get a chance to harvest their pollen. The problem with taking from the garden and giving nothing back is that a really healthy garden acts a bit like a closed loop. Nutrients in = nutrients out. Every time you remove a plant from your garden you are removing the minerals and nutrients that the plant absorbed as it grew. If you just toss the plant and add nothing back into the soil the result is a net reduction in the nutrients in your garden. On a single-plant basis this isn’t really a problem, but if it becomes the way you always garden you’ll find your soil gets depleted over time. The ridiculous thing is that so often we pull out an entire bin-load of plant material and toss it, only to spend unnecessary dollars at a garden shop the next day buying manure, compost and mulch to replace what we turfed. The less you let leave your garden the less you’ll have to spend building it back up. If you have the time, money and inclination, some great ways to help close the loop in your own garden are 1) a compost tumbler for all your food scraps - everything you don’t eat will go back to the garden and nothing is wasted, and 2) a mulcher that will break down all the organic garden waste that would otherwise be thrown out - it makes a fantastic top layer of mulch for your garden, or you can gradually add it into your compost tumbler to let it break down further. If that sounds like a lot of work, the first and easiest thing to start doing is laying plants back on the soil after you’ve pulled them out. It won’t look perfectly neat, but as they decompose the plants will add back nutrients and structure to your soil.
This last point gets at something even deeper, though. It’s not just about keeping your lawn clippings, or putting your veggie scraps in the compost. It’s about a way of viewing your garden that (I think) is ultimately infinitely more rewarding. Nature is not there to be taken from. Even though we’ve built them, our gardens aren’t just there to serve our own needs - to feed us or provide us with pretty flowers or a space to entertain friends.
You don’t just make a garden for yourself. You make it for the the microbiome that will, with your help, begin to flourish in the soil. For the trees whose roots will spread through the ground, helping to prevent long-term erosion. You make it for the bees, whose numbers are dwindling in so many countries across the globe, and the native birds who are always looking for sources of food and safe places to nest and raise chicks. It’s not just a plot of land to grow a few veggies - I realise I’m about to sound like an impassioned (or possibly stoned) greenie, but your garden is this HUGE THING that has a purpose so much greater than just growing flowers and veggies. If we all planted trees, if we all grew backyards full of greenery and pollen and fruit and nectar, we would fundamentally alter our suburban environment. We’d provide birds with havens to rest and feed, frogs with ponds to lounge in, bees with enough food to thrive once more. Our species has enjoyed the fruits of this planet for such a long time without giving very much back. Before I step off my soap box for the week (and don’t worry, I’m about to), my last suggestion is that each of us might begin to view our patch of earth - whether it’s 2 square metres or half an acre - as an opportunity to give a little back to the planet that has given us so much. To see it not as a garden, but as a home we can share with the rest of the natural world in all its winged, feathered, antennae-d and photosynthesising glory.
I will now don my hemp skirt and my crown of foraged beetle wings and bid you adieu.
