Once people find out I’m a landscape designer, they often say something like ‘you must have a beautiful garden’ or ‘I bet you grow the most magnificent roses’ or ‘I’m jealous, my garden will never look as good as yours must look’. If only they could see what my garden really looks like! I used to be too embarrassed to tell people, especially my clients, that actually my garden is hardly a showplace.
In fact, it’s part ‘sick plant hospital’, part ‘testing area for finding ways to outsmart deer’, part ‘home for rejected plants’, part ‘color test zone’ and part ‘I just have to have that plant and no, I don’t know where it will go right now but I know I can find it a home eventually’. Sounds horrifying doesn’t it? Actually, like all gardeners, I love to learn from trial and error. I’d just prefer to do it in my own backyard and not one of my clients!
When we first moved into our home about 17 years ago, I loved to garden but didn’t know too much about plants and their specific needs. We’d moved from a condo and for some reason I guess I thought my big backyard was just an overgrown container. If I was successful with a few containers, this shouldn’t be much different. Boy, was I wrong.
One of my first major gardening projects was transforming a bare area under some hemlock trees into what I imagined would be a wonderful woodland garden. So, without doing much research, I went out and bought a few dozen hostas of all sizes and colors. They looked great for a while until the slugs started feasting on them. And then along came the deer…little did I know hosta are like caviar to deer… and in the course of one night my beautiful hostas were chewed down to stick-like stems. Even the slugs lost interest in them.
After that, I learned to do better research before buying plants, just knowing something is shade-tolerant is definitely not enough. My woodland garden now has leucothoe, bleeding hearts (Dicentra),ferns, forget-me-not (Brunnera), ligularia and coleus. Like the rest of my garden, it’s a work in progress, changing year to year as I plant more of the things that thrive and add new plants to the mix to see what happens.
Take a tip from this landscape designer and stop trying to make your garden look like a showplace, like something you’d see in Garden Design magazine. Yes, do your research so you’re not wasting your money but use your garden to explore your creative side. Grow what you like and what makes you happy and your garden will always be beautiful.
