If you know someone who’d like Garden Study, please forward this their way — but make sure to guide them to the specific way to *opt-in* to Garden Study emails, which you can find here. I’m so, so happy you’re here!
Previously on Garden Study: Container Gardening Explained, Pt. 1, Consider the Ornamental Grass, The Glory of Square Foot Gardening
Today I want to talk about garden mistakes — but first I want to strip the word of its negative connotations. To make a mistake in the garden is to learn so much. Sure, you might make a very similar mistake again next year — but then you’ll learn even more! I find garden mistakes to be amazing teaching tools: I remember a mistake so much more vividly, for example, than another line of text in a gardening book. The garden humbles us all. But it also shows us how to be much better stewards of its beauty.
A Not Even Close to Total List of Recent Garden Mistakes:
Planting a rhody in full sun
Planting another rhody and never watering it the entire summer because hey the other rhodies didn’t need additional watering???
Planting a honeysuckle in near full shade
Putting a hanging basket full of fushias in a place with full afternoon sun (my other basket got morning sun, so I thought it’d be fine?????)
Spraying a white hydrangea with Miracle-Gro water and burning all the petals
Not adding any compost, not even a little, to a three year old pot of dry potting soil when I planted a dahlia tuber (I think I didn’t think it would even come up??)
Sewing a packet of bread poppy seeds in mid-June
Trying to grow a clematis is a medium sized pot
Trying to put a dahlia into an old shallow canoe filled with potting soil but no drainage
Trying to grow any type of vegetable when the fence wasn’t actually deer proof
Pruning a new hydrangea the way I’d pruned a different hydrangea without looking up specifics and then having ONE SINGLE BLOOM this year
So now, I want to hear yours — and what they’ve taught you. Personally, I’m still learning about the specific needs of each plant when it comes to sun and shade, (the large designations re: full sun, partial shade, etc., are very imprecise!) drainage, and the way to nurture a plant as it becomes established. (This year, I’m giving my new hydrangea deep drinks of water every other day; in the future, the hope is it’ll be as drought-tolerant as the ones that have been in the garden for years). I’m also figuring out what “standard” advice I can ignore, or loosely follow….and what is absolutely non-negotiable.
Be expansive, be humble, be kind, be willing to acknowledge just how hilarious all of this is. We’re all learning the bendable and unbendable rules of these weirdos together; some of us just learn things at different points.