Don't Want to Garden? Don't Worry.
Tell me if this sounds familiar:
It’s been a long week. Your neck is stiff from sitting at a computer for the last 5 days straight. It might be Saturday morning but you have various obligations peppered throughout the weekend and you figure it would be nice to start the day with a little walk around the garden. It’ll be peaceful, you think. It might even be inspiring.
You head outside and the first thing you notice is that your lettuce has been decimated by caterpillars. Your lemons are so ripe they’re falling off the tree and you still haven’t picked your zucchinis. A few steps on an artichoke is wilting slowly in the morning sunshine and a fern is crisp and brown - has the reticulation stopped?? Your lawn is two inches too long, your herb garden is full of weeds, mosquito larvae are breeding in the bird bath, your trees need trimming, your daisies need deadheading and your legs are getting intermittently bitten by blow flies!
Gardening. It’s uh…great, right?
Don’t worry. I haven’t suddenly woken up in the blackest mood ever, and I am still TOTALLY on the ‘I love gardening’ bandwagon (in fact, lately I’ve been considering branching out into making ‘I love gardening’ merch, which suggests to me that the obsession is only getting stronger…and also possibly that my fashion sense is going rapidly downhill). I’m a garden fiend, a plant lover, a green witch, I’m drinking ANOTHER cup of coffee and so who really knows where this blog post will end up but stick with me.
The thing is, the last three weeks in Perth have been cold, rainy and dark and in all that time I have done exactly thirty minutes of gardening. THIRTY minutes!!! I feel like a fraud even admitting that. I’ve entered a temporary gardening lull and that is exactly what has motivated today’s blog post. Mainly because it’s something we don’t talk about all that often.
Gardening is always represented as this wholesome, peaceful, joyful activity that people are compelled to do all the time (and for the most part it really is wholesome and joyful and lovely!). But that picture-perfect ideal ignores many of the frustrating realities; the deaths, failures, mosquitos and dog turds that exist in all of our real-world, filter-free gardens. If all we ever see are people who are passionately committed to gardening every single day, we can easily end up with the false impression that we’re somehow failing if we don’t venture outside for a few weeks running. That we’re letting our gardens down or that we don’t have what it takes to create a beautiful patch of earth. Worse still, we might mistakenly think that it means we’ve lost interest in gardening entirely. But, believe me - that’s just wrong.
There are always going to be periods of our lives when the weather is crappy, when our workload is huge, when our back is sore or we’re just plain unmotivated. When the plants that we’ve lovingly tended die or get eaten and we start to wonder if it’s worth all the effort. If you have spent days, weeks - months even - staring out at that patch of land you used to cherish and nurture wondering where the love’s gone, this post is for you. Here are my 5 reminders for you to read on the days when you just don’t feel like gardening.
1. If you don’t feel like gardening - don’t.
I fully acknowledge that this might sound strange coming from someone who, at every other opportunity, rants and raves about the value of getting out into the garden. And although my opinions on that have not budged an inch, I know that nothing makes joy evaporate faster or more fully than feelings of obligation or pressure.
If you don’t actually want to get out into the garden, don’t do it!
I know what you’re worried about. You’re worried that if you don’t go out into the garden things will start to die. That your vegetables - once lovingly tended - will go unharvested and rot slowly in the sunshine and that eventually the entire garden will degenerate into such an untamed wilderness that you’ll never be able to muster the energy to start over. Your gardening career, so promising at first, will wither and decay like your unpicked tomatoes.
The truth is, it takes ages for everything in your garden to die or grow crazily out of control. Yes, if it’s the height of summer and you stop watering entirely you’ll probably witness a bit of an extinction event. But if it’s raining every few days or you have reticulation you’d be surprised how happily the garden can continue ticking along without your input. There’s even something weirdly pleasant about being reminded that the world we’ve created out there doesn’t desperately need us every moment of the day.
We’re gardeners, not farmers. We don’t actually HAVE to do any of this. Gardening happens to be a wildly wonderful activity, but the moment you start feeling like you ‘have’ to do it some of that shimmery pleasure is blunted. Try this instead: give yourself a break. A guilt-free pause for a few days, a week, a month. The wonderful thing about our gardens is that, unlike an incomplete painting or a half-written novel or…I dunno…some cross stitching (??), they don’t stay stagnant while we’re away from them. A garden is a canvas that paints itself in your absence.
And that’s what’s always brought me back after a lull. You walk out into the garden after a few weeks’ absence and it’s like you’re meeting an old friend. Things have changed, grown, died back, bloomed, fruited. Suddenly you want to catch up on everything you’ve missed, and BAM - the motivation is back but you didn’t have to force it. Before you know it you’ll be knee deep digging potatoes out of the earth, your arms will be full of fresh herbs and you’ll wonder what you were even worried about.
2. There is no ‘right’ way to garden
One of the most dispiriting ideas about gardening is that there’s a ‘right’ way to do it. That certain plants are ‘weeds’ and they’re bad. That certain insects are ‘pests’ and they must be killed. That our veggies should be in neat rows, that we must prune our roses in July, that cacti can’t be planted next to tropical fruit trees. Bah!
If you are stressing about having onion grass in your lawn or aphids on your capers it’s no wonder you don’t really feel like gardening. Who wants another bunch of rules to follow? What I love most about my garden is that, ultimately, no one can tell me what to do in it. Everything is an opportunity to experiment. In a world filled with ‘protocols’, norms and endless expectations, our backyards should be places where we can do exactly what we want. Whether it’s sensible or not. After all, a good garden isn’t one that adheres to a bunch of hyper-specific rules. A good garden is simply one that makes its gardener happy.
Who says that we must pull out our coriander when it bolts (the flowers are actually incredibly beautiful!), or that we have to spray our roses at the first sign of thrips, or that you have to plant your sweet peas before Anzac Day/St Patricks/whatever?? Everyone likes to give gardening advice (says Casey, well aware she runs a gardening blog), but that doesn’t mean you have to follow it or stress out because you think you’ve got something ‘wrong’. There’s really no such thing as right or wrong, and in my opinion the only bit of gardening advice that is always worth following is: find a way to garden that makes you happy now. Everything else is either immaterial or will come with time.
3. There is no finish line
One of the most stressful things about gardening is feeling like there is some end-goal; like there’s something that has to be to be ‘achieved’ or ‘completed’. Or, worse still, that there is some kind of ‘perfect’ state that could actually be attained. If you think this way about your garden you’ll never be able to look at it with anything other than critical eyes. Every leaf out of place, every dead flower and unpruned hedge will start to grate on your nerves. And every time you walk through your garden all you’ll see are unfinished jobs and imperfections. It can be very hard to feel like gardening when you approach it from that perspective.
The truth is, there can be no ultimate ideal because a garden is never finished. It can never be finished because the plants will never stop growing and changing. But the point isn’t to achieve some static state of perfection. The only point of a garden is for it to be a space where someone can go to garden. If you are gardening in your garden you are doing it right. It’s the experience that matters. And being self-critical or comparative or worrying about everything that still ‘needs to be done’ will never add anything good to that experience.
Practice letting go of any ideals of perfection. Most of all, ignore bloody Instagram which makes it seem like everyone has perfect, lush gardens where nothing ever dies. Everyone kills plants, everyone has bad harvests and everyone gets scale on their roses. Drop your standards a little and remember what inspired you about your garden in the first place. A new bud on a gardenia, a ladybird on a lemon tree, blue skies and breezes. There’s no end-goal, no timeline and no rush. The only thing you need to do - as much as possible - is enjoy the ride.
4. Gardens aren’t usually well behaved
Expecting our gardens to behave themselves - to be predictable or easily controlled - is one of the biggest sources of disappointment and discouragement. It’s so easy to think that gardening is formulaic. That it can all be boiled down to nutrient deficiencies, beneficial insects and pests, hours of sunlight and millimetres of rain, compost and soil pH. If we each possessed a brain the size of the universe (or at least a sophisticated quantum computer) then maybe it could be. But our gardens are complex systems and they are very, very difficult to accurately model, predict or control.
Weather patterns influence soil and insect life, the sun changes its path across the sky with every season, temperatures fluctuate, it rains (or it doesn’t), birds migrate, bugs reproduce en masse, fungi invade, groundwater rises and sinks and then just when you think you’re getting the hang of it global warming sticks a massive wrench in the whole thing and churns it all up again.
Expecting our gardens to be easy to understand, predictable or controllable is a fool’s errand. And all it does is set us up for disappointment when nature inevitably intervenes in irritating and mysterious ways; sending plagues of grasshoppers to eat our seedlings, endless days of sweltering heat that dry our garden beds or spring storms that knock the blossoms off our fruit trees.
The trick is to go in with a realistic expectation - to accept from the outset that plenty of stuff isn’t going to work. Assume that a certain number of the plants you buy and the seeds you sow are going to die. Prepare for crops to get eaten, to find tomatoes filled with bugs and fruit flies in your oranges. I say all this not to be pessimistic, but to encourage you to see your garden for what it is - a piece of the natural world that is ultimately out of your control. And to realise that none of these unfortunate events means you are doing anything wrong.
When you stop expecting things to go right, everything shifts. Instead of bemoaning the ‘failures’ what becomes miraculous are the successes. Every piece of fruit that wasn’t eaten, each bulb that bursts from the soil becomes a cause for celebration because you know it could just as easily have been a disaster. Practice seeing your garden in this light and you will be much less easily discouraged (I suspect it might also be a very good way to approach our lives in general).
5. The only person to garden for is…yourself
Gardens have played many roles historically. They have been sanctuaries, gestures of love, productive sources of food, and status symbols. In today’s world of manicured lawns, aspirational landscaping and the ubiquitous influence of social media it’s easy to see gardens as something we create for other people to look at. Something that makes our houses (and, by extension, ourselves) look good.
In all this clutter it’s easy to forget who the garden is really for: you. Only you. Forget about how it looks, how productive it is, how fast it’s growing, how slowly it’s growing or whether it would be considered ‘successful’ in anyone else’s eyes. Try to see it less as a space that must be beautiful, or productive or aspirational and more as psychological tool - like a mirror that reflects back at you whatever you’re going through.
If you look at your garden and are overwhelmed by jobs that need doing consider the possibility that it might be life in general that is overwhelming you. Are you going through a busy period? Are you tired or stressed out? If so, let the garden be a peaceful place where you’re free from having to work. Forget what ‘needs doing’ (nothing really needs doing). Spread a picnic blanket out in the sunshine and lay in your imperfect and unfinished garden, appreciating it not for it’s refinement or completion, but for the fact that the trees and the birds and bees are entirely happy for you to spend a few quiet, aimless moments with them, away from everything else that you feel obliged to do.
If you see your garden as a list of imperfections, if you compare it with other gardens and find it falls short, could it be that you’ve fallen generally into a habit of self-criticism and negative thinking? Are you hard on yourself in other areas too? Do you expect a lot from yourself? If so, let you garden be a place where natural imperfections abound and lend a kind of wild, unconcerned beauty to everything. Watch as a creeper tangles itself through the shrub you’ve forgotten to prune. As aphids cover the stems of your Tropical Milkweed and caterpillars bore holes in your Comfrey. Notice how none of that actually matters. It might not make the cover of House and Garden, I guess. It might not be Instagrammable. But the garden doesn’t give a sod about any of that (and neither should you). In the midst of all that ‘imperfection’; a daisy is blooming.
If we strip away the expectations we place on ourselves (and on the plants we try to grow), if we pare everything back to the basic goal of spending time outside engaged in activities that make us happy then our gardens offer us the most wonderful opportunity for creativity, learning, experimentation, exploration and a kind of humbling wonderment. There is no ultimate goal, no greater purpose and it certainly doesn’t say anything about your abilities or level of commitment if things… ‘expire’ from time to time.
Let yourself off the hook. Cut yourself some slack. We get one life. We can spend it worrying about invasive weeds, sub-optimal soil and other people’s bountiful tomato harvests. Or we can decide to like ourselves and our gardens just the way we are (and besides, nine times out of ten the moment you decide to give yourself a break your motivation and passion mysteriously return).
So you don’t want to garden? Don’t worry. Go and sit in the sunshine. Follow a slater around a pile of mulch. Watch a bird forage for worms in the lawn. Eat a mulberry off the tree and daydream about the bulbs you might get next spring. That’s pretty much what I call ‘gardening’ anyway.