Are We Expecting Too Much from Our Gardens?
REFLECTIONS FROM THE GARDEN
Marcus Bergin
8/24/20268 min read
Are We Expecting Too Much from Our Gardens?
We expect a great deal from our gardens.
Colour in every season, something interesting in every border. A lawn that stays green, roses that flower generously, every plant performing more or less as its label promised. We expect ourselves to choose the right plants, put them in the right places, and know exactly what to do the moment something starts to struggle.
When the garden doesn't meet those expectations, we rarely start by questioning the expectations. We look for what we did wrong instead.
Did we water enough? Should we have fed it? Wrong time to prune? Was the hole too shallow, too deep, not improved enough? Maybe we chose the wrong plant, or missed something obvious, or simply weren't paying attention. There's nearly always a reason available, and gardeners can be remarkably inventive when it comes to finding ways to blame ourselves.
Sometimes we are responsible. Plants go into unsuitable places, get watered badly, pruned at the wrong moment. We buy things because they looked wonderful at the garden centre, without giving much thought to where they'll actually live. We overcrowd containers, sow too many seeds, and consistently underestimate how big a seemingly harmless perennial is going to get. Learning from that is part of gardening — if we never ask what went wrong, we'll go on repeating it.
But sometimes it was simply a hard year.
A plant can be correctly chosen, carefully planted and properly looked after, and still struggle through prolonged heat, drought, too much rain, or a late frost. A border that's performed beautifully for years can suddenly look exhausted. The lawn goes brown, plants stop flowering, things we'd come to rely on just disappear. We stand there looking at the result and feel we must have done something differently.
I still catch myself doing this, and I've been gardening professionally for more than twenty-five years. I can look at a garden that's been through an exceptionally difficult season and feel its condition must reflect something I failed to do — some intervention I missed, some bit of knowledge I should have applied, some moment when I could have changed the outcome.
That's an enormous amount of responsibility to put on one gardener.
We can prepare the soil, choose plants carefully, mulch, water, offer shade. We can study the garden and adapt what we do. What we can't do is control the weather, keep out every pest, or persuade a plant to survive conditions beyond what it can actually take. A garden isn't a sealed environment. It's exposed to everything going on around it, and our influence, real as it is, is never complete.
Oddly, we understand this perfectly well when we're looking at the wider landscape. Nobody walks past a field scorched by drought and assumes the farmer forgot how to farm — we know it was the weather. Yet the moment the same conditions hit our own garden, the brown lawn and the collapsed perennials suddenly feel personal.
That's because the garden is close to us. We chose the plants, paid for them, put them in the ground ourselves. We've watched them grow and attached hopes to what they might become. When they struggle, it can feel like something we made is coming apart.
The disappointment is real, and it shouldn't be waved off with the reminder that gardening's supposed to be relaxing. There are gardeners who've put years into a border and watched it fall apart over a few difficult months. People who've lost favourite plants, struggled to keep a new tree alive, watched deer, rabbits or voles undo work almost as fast as it went in. We may know intellectually that these things happen. That doesn't stop them being upsetting. There can be tears in a garden as well as pleasure.
What matters is what we decide those losses mean.
A difficult season doesn't prove the garden's failed, and it certainly doesn't prove the gardener has. It might show that certain plants were less resilient than expected, that part of the garden needs to change, or that our own methods need adjusting. Useful lessons — but a long way short of a verdict on our ability.
Gardening knowledge often gets talked about as though enough of it will eventually protect us from failure. Learn the rules, understand the plants, and it'll all come right. The longer I do this, the less convinced I am that expertise offers that kind of certainty. Experience helps you spot patterns and make better decisions, and it improves the odds. It doesn't make plants obedient.
There are things I know now that I didn't when I started. There are also plenty of subjects I feel less certain about than I once did. The answer to almost any gardening question depends so heavily on the soil, the weather, the position and the condition of the individual plant that confidence tends to give way, eventually, to a rather more honest "it depends". That uncertainty isn't evidence we know nothing — it's evidence we've started to understand how complicated a living system actually is.
Plants keep surprising us. The one we protected and fussed over fails, while something growing out of a crack in the paving manages perfectly well without any help at all. A supposedly delicate plant sails through a brutal winter, then dies during an ordinary one. One border thrives in a dry summer while another, only a few feet away, seems to shut down completely. The garden doesn't always explain itself. We can investigate, learn, make sensible changes — without assuming every outcome could have been predicted. Sometimes there's no single mistake to point at. A few small pressures combine, or the conditions simply go further than the plant could stand.
There's a temptation, after a hard year, to redesign everything at once. We look at the bare patches, the dead stems, the tired foliage, and start making lists of replacements. The catalogues offer us plants described as stronger, tougher, more reliable. We tell ourselves next time we'll get it right.
Some change will genuinely be needed. Replace a plant with exactly the same thing in exactly the same spot after it's failed there twice, and that's optimism rather than good judgement — gardens have to adapt as conditions shift, particularly with heat, drought and heavy rain all becoming harder to predict. Being kinder to ourselves doesn't mean refusing to learn. We might need to mulch more deeply, cut down the number of pots that need daily watering, improve the soil, create more shade. We might lean towards plants that have already proved they can cope with our conditions, and get more cautious about the ones needing constant rescue. A hard year can expose weaknesses a gentler one let us overlook.
But adaptation and self-blame aren't the same thing.
Adaptation asks: what did the garden show me, and what might I change? Self-blame asks: why wasn't I good enough to stop this happening? The first question lets you move forward. The second turns a garden into an exam you keep failing.
Gardening already carries enough uncertainty without turning it into a test of personal worth. A plant dying doesn't mean you lack judgement. A border looking poor through difficult weather doesn't erase every year it flourished. Even a genuine mistake isn't proof you should have known better — sometimes a lesson only becomes real once you've ignored it and watched what happens.
The gardens that teach us most aren't necessarily the ones where everything succeeds. A bed crammed with too many seedlings might become a beautiful chaotic tangle the bees love, and also teach you to sow more sparingly next year. A plant put in the wrong place can tell you something you didn't know about the light or the soil. A failed attempt at one style of garden can show you that a different one would suit the place — and you — far better. Mistakes are expensive and frustrating, but they're also proof you tried something.
There's a difference, too, between the garden we imagine and the one the site will actually allow. We carry the image of a cottage garden into a small dry plot where that abundance was never going to happen. We want moisture-loving plants on free-draining ground, or delicate flowers in a garden the deer visit every night. Keep trying to force the image onto the place for long enough and a hobby can turn into a job you no longer enjoy. It can also chip away at your judgement more generally — enough failed plants and every new purchase starts to feel risky, every bare patch starts to look like proof of something unresolved. That's when expectations get properly unkind.
The garden doesn't have to become the one we first pictured to be worth having. It might end up simpler, more wooded, more dependent on pots. Fewer kinds of plants, but more of the ones that genuinely thrive. It may never look like the photograph, and it can still be somewhere you actually want to spend time. There's no shame in adjusting the ambition to fit the reality.
Our own circumstances shift too. A garden planned when we had more time, energy or strength can become hard to manage. Illness arrives, backs start to complain, jobs that once took an afternoon now stretch over several days. We can treat that as one more way the garden's failing to meet expectations, or we can let the garden change along with us. Cutting the workload, asking for help, letting things go a bit more informal — none of that undoes what we built. A mature garden carries its history even when it's no longer kept in quite the same way. Plants age. Gardeners age. Neither stays exactly as it was thirty years ago.
There's something rather moving about a gardener heading into their own winter and still noticing the seedlings, the flowers, the habits of the deer that keep visiting. The garden may not look how it once did. The relationship carries on regardless.
Maybe our expectations don't need lowering so much as widening. Instead of expecting every plant to flourish, we might expect to be surprised. Instead of demanding continuous colour, we could pay more attention to the quieter stretches, when a single flower matters more. Instead of deciding a successful garden is one without loss, we might find success in how well it recovers and changes.
A hard season can leave very little to admire above ground. In those years the most important work is often happening where we can't see it — roots staying alive, mulch protecting the soil, buds forming, plants simply waiting out the conditions. Something that looks finished may only be resting.
The gardener waits too. Not always patiently. There's almost always an assumption that next year might be better. We divide what survived, move what struggled, make another list. Even after the deer have eaten the spring growth, the rabbits have found a gap in the fence, and drought has cracked the ground solid, the plans start forming again anyway.
That persistence is one of the more remarkable things about gardeners. We complain, get disheartened, occasionally threaten to give the whole thing up — and then a catalogue turns up, a seedling appears, the rain finally starts, and we're straight back in. Gardening has something of gambling about it. We know we can't control the outcome, and we come back for another season regardless.
The hope in that isn't entirely sensible, but it isn't blind either. Each year adds a bit more knowledge. We find out what survived, what needed too much rescuing, what surprised us. We change the odds where we can, and accept the final result was never going to belong entirely to us.
The garden isn't promising perfection in exchange for our effort. It's offering participation. That might be the only expectation worth holding onto.
We'll keep making mistakes. The weather will keep testing plans made for different conditions, and plants will keep ignoring everything ever written about them. Some years will be generous. Others will seem determined to find every weakness in the garden at once. Our job is to pay attention, look after what we can, and change what needs changing — not to prevent the garden from ever having a bad year.
A struggling garden might need water, mulch, protection, or a different choice of plants. It might just need time.
The gardener probably needs something similar — practical knowledge, a bit of perspective, and permission not to treat every loss as a personal failing.
Gardens have bad years. So do gardeners. Neither should be judged entirely by them.
Happy Gardening.
Marcus
