No Garden Is Perfect

We are very good at photographing the best parts of our gardens.

We wait until the light catches a hosta properly, or until a fern has opened without a single damaged frond. We move slightly to one side so the untidy corner disappears behind a shrub, and make sure the compost bags, hosepipe and half-filled wheelbarrow are outside the frame.

There's nothing dishonest about that, really — a photograph is always a choice, and if something looks particularly beautiful, of course that's the part we want to remember and share. I love seeing those photographs myself. They give us ideas, introduce us to plants we might never have grown, let us into gardens we'd otherwise never see.

The trouble starts when we forget we're looking at a selected view. One corner. One moment, one season, a fraction of a garden inside four carefully chosen edges. We don't see the bare patch immediately behind the photographer, or the shrub that died the previous winter, or the border abandoned halfway through, or the pots of plants still sitting there because nobody's quite decided where they're going.

Then we walk into our own gardens and hold that edited photograph up against everything we can see. Every gap, every weed, every scorched leaf, every unfinished job. We remember what a particular plant cost before it died. We know the "temporary" pile beside the shed has been there three years, and that the nice border by the patio only really works if you don't look too closely at its far end.

Somebody else's garden looks perfect because we only ever see the part they chose to show us. Ours looks imperfect because we know all its secrets — which isn't really a fair comparison when you put it like that.

The Parts Outside the Frame

When gardeners were invited to share the bits they'd normally leave out of a photograph, the same plants and problems kept turning up.

Ferns turned brown by heat and drought. Hostas eaten by deer, plants reduced to stalks by rabbits, bergenias whose leaves had become something of an insect buffet. Shrubs struggling where the surrounding trees had gradually changed the conditions around them, and borders where almost everything planted had either disappeared or simply refused to thrive.

One gardener described a small shaded bed where ferns, brunnera, ajuga and Alchemilla had all struggled — even the plants we usually describe as dependable for shade had found that particular spot too much. There's something almost reassuring about a place that manages to kill ajuga. Not for the gardener who's spent money and effort trying to establish it, obviously, but for the rest of us — we tend to assume that if something described as "easy" fails, the gardener must have done something wrong, when really no plant is easy in every garden. Sometimes the conditions genuinely are that difficult.

Elsewhere, heucheras were barely hanging on despite careful planting, while another heuchera had survived for years in the bottom of a neglected pot, apparently quite content. That seems fairly typical of gardening to me. The plant we research and prepare for and fuss over gives up, and something forgotten behind the shed decides it rather likes the arrangement.

Not Every Failure Is Dead

The photographs also raised a more interesting question, really: what actually counts as failure?

A plant can be growing perfectly well and still be wrong for the garden — the wrong colour, the wrong size, simply in the wrong spot. A group of grasses can be entirely healthy and still throw a planting off balance. A shrub can flourish while blocking a path or smothering everything around it. There are successful plants that become problems precisely because they're successful.

Bamboo inherited with a garden might spend decades turning up where it isn't wanted, and still be the thing screening an ugly fence or giving you privacy from next door. Japanese anemones can spread well beyond the space you originally gave them, though in an otherwise difficult border they might also be one of the only things willing to grow there at all. A plant can be useful and infuriating in more or less equal measure, and gardens are full of that particular kind of compromise.

Wildlife complicates it further. Birds scratching mulch onto a path can make a bed look untidy, but those same birds are probably eating the snails and insects that would otherwise be after your hostas. A hosta chewed by deer looks like a disaster to us and a perfectly good meal to the deer. That doesn't mean we have to be delighted every time an animal destroys something we planted — I've never bought the idea that wildlife gardening means surrendering the whole garden without protest — but it's a reminder that the garden's being judged by more than one set of eyes, and ours isn't the only verdict that matters there.

A Garden Carries Real Life in It

There are reasons for an untidy or unfinished garden that have very little to do with gardening ability.

Builders may have occupied the space. Work gets busy. Money's needed elsewhere. Health changes, families need attention, the weather refuses to cooperate with whatever we'd planned. There are stretches where simply keeping everything watered counts as an achievement, never mind building a beautiful border.

Some gardens are being made by people with a great deal of time, help and money behind them. Others are squeezed into the edges of already full lives. We rarely see that context in a photograph — we see a wonderful garden and assume its owner is simply better at this than we are, without knowing how many years it took, what it cost, whether there was professional help involved, or how many earlier versions of that same border got dug up and started again along the way. Nor do we know which parts of that wonderful garden are currently disappointing its owner.

I've worked in gardens most people would call extraordinary. Even there, something's always wrong. A plant's failed, a hedge is thinner than it should be, a bed's lost its way. The scale changes. Perfection doesn't really arrive at any of it.

The Finished Garden We Keep Expecting

A lot of garden disappointment comes down to the idea that one day the garden will be finished — every plant grown to the right size, every gap filled, the colours working, the weeds gone, nothing left to move. We'll finally get to stand back and see the garden we meant to make.

That moment, if it comes at all, lasts about a fortnight.

Plants keep growing. Trees cast more shade than they used to. Shrubs start leaning into their neighbours. Something self-seeds into a better spot than the one we chose for it, while another plant quietly vanishes from the place it was meant to be perfect. A border can reach its best just as one of its main plants starts to decline.

The garden isn't misbehaving so much as simply moving. We design it, but we don't get to freeze it in the year the design worked best — every season takes it somewhere else again, and the same corner can be magnificent in spring and slightly embarrassing by autumn. A photograph captures the magnificent week and lets the rest of the year slide. The garden itself doesn't get that luxury. It just carries on.

Imperfection Is Often Where the Garden Begins to Teach Us

The awkward parts of a garden often tell us more than the successful ones.

A plant that keeps scorching may be showing us the afternoon sun is harsher there than we realised. Repeated failures under a tree can reveal just how severe the root competition has got. One variety thriving while another struggles nearby can expose a difference no plant label ever explained. The gap isn't only a gap — it's information, most of the time, if we're prepared to read it that way. So is the fern that always collapses by midsummer, or the shrub that flowers poorly, or the border that's never quite held together. They're showing us the limits of the place, and sometimes the limits of what we're actually willing to do to keep it going.

That doesn't mean every failure has to become a project. Some areas we can replant or redesign. Others may be telling us to stop trying quite so hard — if only one or two plants are genuinely content in a difficult corner, letting more of those plants take it over is probably wiser than buying something new every spring and hoping this time it sticks.

There's no rule that says every part of a border has to be full at every moment of the year. Space lets plants actually be seen. It gives us room to change our minds, and it leaves room for something unexpected to turn up on its own. We tend to photograph fullness because it looks impressive, but in the garden itself a bit of emptiness can do real work.

The Value of an Honest Photograph

Photographing the imperfect areas can be surprisingly useful, actually.

A picture taken for beauty tends to confirm what's already working. A wider, less flattering shot helps you see relationships that are harder to notice standing among the plants themselves — you might suddenly spot that a shrub's got too large, or that several plants are all doing the same shape, or that the real problem isn't the planting at all but the lack of structure behind it. I know gardeners who use photographs mainly to record what needs dividing or moving, which strikes me as a far more useful album than one containing only the finest moments.

Those photographs of failures become evidence of change too, over time. A bare border can look completely different two years on. A plant you were ready to dig out may recover. Something that seemed insignificant at the time can turn into the plant that holds the whole corner together. Without the earlier photograph, it's easy to forget how far the garden's actually travelled — and easy to forget how much work went into getting it there, since gardeners are generally much better at noticing what's unfinished than at noticing what they've already done.

Perfection Would Be a Strange Ambition

I'm not arguing against beautiful gardens, or suggesting we stop trying to improve them. Wanting something to look better is a large part of what gardening is. We move plants, redesign borders, repair lawns, try again when a combination hasn't worked. There's real satisfaction in finally getting an awkward area to come together.

The problem isn't improvement. It's the belief that a successful garden shouldn't contain any failure at all.

After more than twenty-five years of doing this, I still put plants in the wrong places. I still misjudge how big something's going to get. Plants die, the weather changes the plan, a border that looked completely convincing in my head can look quite different once it's actually in the ground. Experience hasn't really removed any of that. It's mostly just made me less alarmed by it than I used to be.

A garden with no failures in it would be a garden where nothing new had ever really been attempted — no room for experiments, no discoveries, no plant bought on a whim without the faintest idea where it's going to live. It might be immaculate. I'm not sure it would be very interesting.

The real garden includes the glorious hosta and the one chewed down to its stalks. It includes the fern at its best in spring and the same fern looking exhausted by late summer. The border that's finally come together, and the corner we still haven't worked out. None of that cancels the rest of it out — it's all just the same garden, being itself.

Next time we see a beautiful photograph, maybe we just enjoy it for what it is — one lovely view somebody wanted to share — without building an entire imagined garden around it. And when we look at our own, it's probably worth remembering that someone else would happily photograph the part we've stopped noticing, the bit we walked straight past on our way to go and stare at the weeds.

Happy Gardening.

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Marcus Bergin

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

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