Is Experience Learning What Not to Do?

You might imagine that the longer someone gardens, the more things they learn to do.

They learn how to prune a rose, divide a perennial, plant a tree properly. They get better at recognising what's growing, understanding their soil, spotting when something's starting to go wrong. Each year adds another layer of knowledge until, after thirty or forty years, the experienced gardener must have an enormous collection of jobs, techniques and dependable answers.

Yet when experienced gardeners talk about how their gardening has changed, they usually describe what they've stopped doing.

They no longer dig every piece of open ground, or remove every fallen leaf, or reach for a spray the moment aphids appear. They've stopped trying to grow certain plants in places where those plants keep failing. Some no longer wash every pot, sow hundreds of seeds, or fight to keep a lawn green that spends every summer turning brown. Others have made their peace with self-seeded plants, untidy corners, and gaps that don't need filling before the afternoon's out.

Which makes me wonder whether experience isn't only about learning how to garden. A good deal of it might be learning what the garden never actually asked of us in the first place.

When I started gardening professionally, I probably felt everything needed a response. A plant not doing well needed doing to. Weeds needed removing. Anything untidy needed tidying, and a plant growing somewhere I hadn't put it was almost certainly in the wrong place. The assumption behind most of that was that the gardener ought to be in control — that a good garden was one where plants behaved as expected, borders stayed orderly, and problems got caught early enough for something to be done. There was always a correct action, and a knowledgeable gardener was supposed to know what it was.

Twenty-five years on, I'm far more inclined to watch for a while first.

I've learnt that not every yellow leaf means trouble. Sometimes a leaf is just old. A few aphids don't always need immediate action, whatever the label on the spray bottle once told us. Their predators are often already on the way, and the plant can usually put up with them until help arrives.

A seedling in the wrong part of a border might not be in the wrong place either. From our point of view it's ignored the plan. From the plant's point of view, it's found the light, moisture and soil it needs — and sometimes it does better than the expensive one we carefully positioned, watered and worried over. It chose its own moment and its own spot. Left alone long enough, it may settle in among the others in a way we'd never have planned ourselves.

That doesn't mean every seedling stays. Let every sycamore, ash, elder and bramble have its way and plenty of gardens would slowly turn into woodland. Some self-seeders are generous. Others are trying to take the whole border.

The difference experience makes is that we're less likely to pull something out simply because we didn't put it there. We look first — whether it adds anything, whether there's room for it, whether we're prepared for what happens if it seeds again. We still make a decision. It's just become an act of editing rather than automatic removal.

I like that idea, gardening as editing. It doesn't mean abandoning the garden, or standing back while the most vigorous plants take over. An editor removes what's unnecessary, strengthens what deserves attention, and tries not to interfere with what's already working. Good editing is selective, and its greatest contribution is often knowing what to leave alone.

There's a fashion at the moment for treating less intervention as automatically more natural, more sustainable, and therefore better. I'm not convinced it's quite that simple. A neglected garden and a thoughtfully relaxed one aren't the same thing.

Leaving leaves under trees and shrubs feeds the soil and gives wildlife shelter. Leaving them in a thick wet layer across a path is a good way of sending someone flying. A patch of nettles supports insects; nettles taking over the whole garden might not be what you want. A few dandelions in a lawn can look rather lovely. Ground elder or bindweed moving through a border at speed is a different matter entirely. Nature doesn't share our ideas about balance, access, or which plants we'd actually like to keep. Step away completely, and the garden carries on changing — just not necessarily into the garden you hoped to live with.

The point isn't that experienced gardeners stop working. They get more selective about where the work actually makes a difference.

There's a real difference between deciding a job is unnecessary and avoiding a job because it's hard. It would be easy to call every untended corner wildlife habitat and every spreading weed a deliberate experiment. Sometimes a border genuinely does need clearing — plants get swamped by competition, paths become unusable, shrubs need pruning before they outgrow their space. Traditional gardening standards didn't arise purely to keep people busy. Much of the old knowledge still holds. Caring for soil, pruning at the right time, keeping invasive plants in check, maintaining some structure — that's often the difference between a garden that matures well and one that slowly loses its shape.

Experience doesn't teach you that nothing needs doing. It teaches you to ask why you're doing it.

Am I removing every leaf because it's harming something, or because a bare border has been presented to me as the correct look for autumn? Am I feeding a plant because it needs feeding, or because the calendar's reached the month the packet mentions? Am I spraying aphids because the plant's genuinely struggling, or because their being there makes me feel I've lost control of the garden?

And, harder still — am I trying to rescue a plant that's told me repeatedly it doesn't want to grow there?

That last one can take years to accept. Gardeners are remarkably stubborn once we've decided a particular plant belongs in a particular place. We improve the soil, adjust the watering, feed it, protect it, replace it when it dies. The plant keeps giving the same answer. We keep asking the same question.

Eventually experience might mean accepting the answer. That's not failure. A gardener who gives up trying to grow delphiniums in unsuitable ground, or stops the fight to establish delicate plants under thirsty tree roots, hasn't given up gardening. They've started gardening the place they actually have, rather than the one they wish they had.

The plants already thriving there can tell you a great deal. A self-seeded plant that's survived heat, dry ground, winter wet and competition is often worth more than something bought because it looked wonderful in a photograph. Dividing and repeating what already does well isn't as exciting as coming home with a car full of unfamiliar new purchases, but it usually makes for a more convincing garden. You can spend years buying what you hope will grow before realising the garden's been telling you what works all along.

The same goes for how a garden looks. Most of us start with an image borrowed from somewhere else — a television programme, a magazine, a show garden, the picture on a plant label. We imagine soothing green planting and then discover what actually gives us pleasure is colour moving in the wind. We aspire to clean lines and neatly separated plants, then find we're much happier with flowers leaning into one another and seedlings coming up in the gaps.

Taste changes as experience grows. What once looked untidy starts to look abundant. A brown seed head left standing becomes winter structure rather than a missed job. Ivy stops being something to strip off every surface and becomes cover and habitat, provided it's growing where you can live with it. An elder that would once have come out without a second thought might earn its place through shade, blossom, berries, and the life it supports.

None of these plants has changed. We have.

That might be one of gardening's quieter lessons. We start out trying to turn the garden into our original idea. Given time, the garden changes the idea instead.

Plans still matter. Without some thought, a garden becomes a collection of individual purchases with little relation to one another, and structure matters too, particularly in winter and in smaller spaces where every plant has to earn its place. But no garden goes on looking like the drawing it started from. Plants grow at different rates, some vanish, others spread further than anyone expected. Trees mature, shade moves, and the weather exposes weaknesses nobody could have predicted. A garden might resemble the original vision for a while. It won't stay there. Change isn't something that happens to a garden after we've made it — change is what a garden does.

Experience seems to make people more comfortable with that. An empty patch doesn't have to be filled straight away. A plant knocked sideways by a sudden change in light can be given a season to show whether it'll adapt. A struggling perennial doesn't always need lifting the moment it looks unhappy. Waiting becomes a gardening technique, even though it never turns up on a list of essential skills.

Beginners understandably want answers. How often should I water this? When must I cut that back? What should I feed it with? Experienced gardeners ask many of the same questions, but tend to grow suspicious of any answer that doesn't start with "it depends".

The soil matters. The weather matters. The age and condition of the plant matter. Two apparently identical gardens can behave quite differently because one catches the wind and the other's sheltered by walls. Advice that worked perfectly last year can be entirely wrong after weeks of drought or an unusually wet winter.

Twenty-five years of gardening hasn't made the garden more obedient. If anything it's left me less certain than I used to be, not more.

There are obviously things I know now that I didn't when I started. I spot problems faster, and I understand more of what a plant's likely to need. But there's a much longer list of things I once thought had definite answers, and now know depend on the plant, the soil, the weather, the garden, and occasionally what looks a lot like sheer bloody-mindedness on the part of the plant.

I still kill plants. I still put things in the wrong place and realise months later I should have known better. There's usually at least one shrub a year that I look at after pruning and think I might have gone slightly too far.

Experience doesn't remove mistakes. It changes how you respond to them. You stop treating every failure as an emergency, or every unexpected outcome as proof you've done something terribly wrong. You move the plant, replace it with something better suited, or leave the gap and see what happens next. The mistake becomes part of learning the garden, rather than a mark against your ability to garden it.

There may come a point where some forms of gardening stop being worth the work they demand. A lawn that needs feeding, edging and watering but still turns brown every summer might give way to wider borders or longer grass. Rows of tender bedding get replaced with perennials. The annual ritual of filling a greenhouse with far too many seed trays, followed by weeks of hardening everything off, starts to lose its appeal.

That decision is personal. One gardener might happily tend dozens of pots because they provide exactly the colour that makes the garden worthwhile. Another reduces their containers because keeping them watered has become relentless. Neither is more experienced simply for doing less. Experience is in recognising which effort still brings pleasure, and which has become an obligation inherited from an earlier version of the garden — or an earlier version of ourselves.

Our bodies change alongside our gardens. Injury, illness and age can force decisions we wouldn't otherwise have made. Slopes get harder, heavy digging loses its charm, help may be needed for jobs once managed alone. There can be real sadness in that. But adapting the garden isn't admitting defeat. Replacing a difficult lawn, reducing the pots, bringing someone in for the heavier work — any of these can let the relationship with the garden carry on.

The aim was never to preserve every task. It's to preserve what gardening gives us.

The more I think about it, the less I believe experience can be measured by the number of techniques a gardener has collected. It shows up just as clearly in the interventions they no longer make, the problems they let time resolve, and the plants they've stopped trying to force into places that were never right for them.

A less experienced gardener acts because something has happened. A more experienced one can sometimes wait, because they've a better idea of what might happen next.

That waiting isn't laziness. Leaving every job undone isn't wisdom either. The difficult part sits in between — working out what genuinely needs your attention, what can wait, and what was never necessary at all.

Gardening is a process of learning, but it's also a process of unlearning. We pick up rules, habits and expectations, then slowly work out which of them actually belong in our own gardens. Some stay essential. Others soften into rough guidance. A few get dropped altogether.

The result probably isn't a garden that needs no work — I'm not sure that garden exists.

It might just be a garden where the work has more purpose.

Happy Gardening.

Marcus

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Marcus Bergin

Thoughts, observations and conversations from a life spent in gardens.