How I became a messy gardener (and why you should too)
The benefits of learning to let go of control and embrace the mess
Hi, I’m Dan, and this is my alternative gardening newsletter, The Earthworm. Whether you’re a first-time reader or a long-time subscriber, thanks for being here. The Earthworm is a reader-supported publication. The two best ways you can support my work are to share this newsletter with a friend, and to consider upgrading to a paid subscription. And remember, the entire back catalogue of features, interviews, columns and more is freely available to all members of The Earthworm community. Why not take a scroll down memory lane?
These past few weeks, I’ve been learning how to become a messy gardener. Now, anyone who has ever set foot in my garden would likely attest that I had long ago mastered this approach. How could the person responsible for this weed-matted patio, this unkempt lawn, these scruffy shrubs, claim to be anything other than a paragon of untidiness and a master of mess?
But messy gardening, as I’ve come to realise, is not about the state of your garden, but about your state of mind.
The way I see it, gardening is a two-sided coin. The first is the creative side. This doesn’t just refer to creativity in the sense of a garden redesign or transformation but, in my view at least, refers to anything that we conceive or do in our gardens that is going to introduce something new. Sure, sketching out an updated layout for your borders is creative, but so too is sowing seeds, or simply potting up a newly purchased perennial.
The second side of gardening is maintenance; tending to what is already there. Mowing the lawn, trimming the hedge, pruning, deadheading, and of course weeding – these are the pillars of maintenance gardening.
But what both creative gardening and maintenance gardening have in common is that they are active undertakings. They involve interfering with your garden, stamping your authority over the space and making your mark upon it. And this is true whether you’re a head gardener responsible for the upkeep of a vast National Trust estate, or whether you’ve got a couple of pots on a third floor balcony.
Messy gardening demands a whole new mindset. It is a more passive – though no less conscious or deliberate – approach. (Which is also, by the way, why a messy gardener is not to be confused with a lazy or neglectful or inexpert gardener.) The “imperfections” in a messy gardeners’ plot are there not due to a failure or oversight on their part, but because the gardener welcomes it. It is an open (what grows in your) border policy.
A messy gardener must first learn to relinquish control. This is easier said than done. Just ask any member of the current Conservative cabinet – once you’ve had a taste of power, diminishing your dominion is difficult. But, again like the serving British government, sometimes there are very good reasons to take a step back, or down, or away, and to let someone or something else flourish in your place. We gardeners need to be less Boris, is what I’m saying.
Why? Well, the obvious answer – and the one you’ll hear most often in relation to the benefits of messy gardening – is that an untidy green space provides a paradise for wildlife. Long lawns, fallen leaves and decaying, well, anything, all provide food, refuge and habitat for creatures of every shape and size.
There are entire ecosystems built around individual wildflowers (i.e. weeds), with certain species of butterfly, moth, bee, beetle and others relying on the existence of those plants in order to complete their life cycles. Neat and tidy gardens, devoid of dandelions and nettles and brambles and thistles, are gardens devoid of bugs and, in turn, birds, bats, hedgehogs… You get the picture. (Numbers of all of these species in Britain, by the way, continue to plummet at an alarming rate.)
Sometimes though, if we’re honest, we don’t always see the benefits of our actions on the wider environment as enough of a reason to warrant behaviour change. We know we should cycle to the shops, not drive; or ask for oat milk in our coffee, not dairy. But we don’t, because, frankly, we can’t be bothered, or we simply don’t want to. Well, the good news is that I happen to believe that messy gardening is just as beneficial to the gardener as it is to the planet and its non-human inhabitants.
The first benefit of embracing mess is to reduce stress. Last autumn, fed up with the carpet of dandelion, trailing bellflower, chickweed, petty spurge, herb-robert, grasses and moss growing between the brickwork on the patio floor, I took a table knife from the kitchen drawer, got down on my hands and knees, and scraped out every single scrap of greenery. To suppress the weeds, I then back-filled the gaps with horticultural sand. (I could have filled the cracks with cement, I know, but that would have created a drainage disaster.)
By spring, the foliage flooring had grown back to its dense former glory. At first, I was disappointed. Next, I added a patio weed brush to my online shopping basket. But finally, I decided that actually, the patio looks quite nice – softer, looser – with these shaggy green seams running through it. So now, when the grasses grow too bushy, or a mound of trailing bellflower prevents the back door from opening, I take action. But otherwise, I just enjoy the mess and the subsequent lack of stress, and tick “weed patio” off my mental to-do list.
And the benefits don’t end there.
Against a northwest-facing fence in our garden, under the dappled shade of a Japanese maple, an unquantified number of strawberry plants are growing in pots. I say “pots”: half of them are in rusty old tomato tins salvaged from outside a local pizza place. By the book, you should replace strawberry plants every couple of years, as they lose their fruit-producing vigour over time. You should also remove the runners – the non-fruiting shoots they send out to create new plants – as otherwise energy is funnelled into green growth rather than lovely juicy berries. But seeing as I’m not relying on a bumper harvest for either sale or subsistence, I tend to leave them to it.
Well, a couple of months ago, whilst inspecting the extent of the patio weedery, I noticed a cohort of little strawberry seedlings which had rooted into the centimetre-wide sandy slits between bricks at the base of the acer. I didn’t expect them to survive, let alone fruit, but I thought there was no harm in letting them be and seeing what happened. Well, as the photo at the top of this post shows, one of those pioneering plantlets has already produced four deliciously plump berries, which look just about ready to harvest.
I’m not saying that messy gardening is guaranteed to give you free strawberries. But in allowing plants to grow where they want to, or at least where they will, we’re giving ourselves the opportunity to be pleasantly surprised; to enjoy a flower or fruit or fluttering butterfly that we might otherwise have missed.
Plants growing in wild places, free from human interference, are in constant conversation – or battle, if you prefer – with one another. Some will thrive, others will not. What you end up with is the paradigmatic example of “right plant, right place” – that time-honoured mantra of garden design.
By contrast, in our gardens, we tend to do nothing but interfere. In order to protect one plant, we cut back, divide or remove another. If our climate is too dry for the vegetation in our borders, we water. If our clay soil is too heavy for our favoured Mediterranean shrubs, we add grit to improve the drainage. And there is nothing wrong with this tampering and artifice; therein, after all, lies the difference between a cultivated environment and a wild one. But what we’re missing out on with our meddling, hands-on approach – where everything has its place within our masterplan, and if it doesn’t, it is ceremoniously ejected – are the happy accidents.
Being a messy gardener is harder than it might sound – it’s difficult to suppress the instinct to spruce, to tidy up and make good. But for your own sake, try loosening your grip on how your garden grows. You never know what you might find, and you might just learn to love the mess.
Are you a messy gardener? Do you welcome happy accidents and allow a little unruliness in your borders? Or do you rule with an iron fist? Leave a comment, or feel free to just hit “reply” if you’re reading this in your inbox.
Love this from beginning to end, Dan.