Garden mistakes
The freedom to mess up and try again.
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Last week, my girlfriend called me a “gardenista.” I’m not sure if she meant that I have good taste in gardens or a flair of the dramatic, but I took it as a compliment.
I grow plants on my apartment roof and in a tiny tree bed scratched out of the New York City sidewalk. I love the quiet solidity of growing things and the uncomplicated joy of new leaves. During Covid, when my home was stripped bare by divorce and joy was in short supply, a few more plants moved in. After I ran out of space for my own plants, I made over my friends’ gardens.
When I stop by their gardens, my friends hurry to pull up weeds and snip off dead leaves. They apologize for the messy bits, as if I’d judge them for less-than-perfect plants. But I’m not that kind of plant lady. Sure, I’m part of a plant swap group where you trade cutting with neighbors. Yes, when I referred to these neighbors as my “plant friends,” my therapist stopped me to confirm that I was talking about people and not plants. Sure, my (real live human) friends send me wildflower seeds and plant pins and mugs that look like flowerpots, and I love it all.
But I’m not perfect at gardening—and I have no desire to be. On the wonderful new Garden Study thread on
, where average people nerd out about plants, one recent comment put it perfectly: “As an adult, I haven’t found a lot of safe spaces for failure. But in gardening, the consequences are minimal.”
I love this idea because I’m not great at messing up. As a recovering perfectionist, I’m still making peace with the many mistakes I made in marriage and the long years they took to unwind. I made an impulsive choice to marry young and lived two decades of consequences because there was no safe space to fail. Once I picked my path, I felt bound to see it through no matter how thorny it was.
Yet I don’t carry that guilt into the garden. It’s the one place I feel fully free to get things wrong, throw up my hands, and simply start over. The cycling of the seasons creates a built-in chance to reset. Each spring, I indulge in whatever whimsy strikes—purple sunflowers! passion fruit! milkweed!—because I know I can always rip things out later if they don’t work. The grander my garden ambition, the more absurd the result.
This spring, I went big on bulbs. With the enthusiasm of a bride planning a wedding, I built a color-coordinated Pinterest board of sequential spring blooms. I proudly sent it to my neighbors and promised Holland in our front yard. One pot of tulips came up with a delicate blend of purple and cream. The other pot came up a cockeyed yellow. The irises bloomed two inches tall. Up on my roof, nothing bloomed at all. My mini meadow, a wildflower wonderland last summer, popped out a lonely coneflower. Meanwhile, a friend’s garden that I planted with the exact same plants went bananas.
Down in my tree bed, my baby oak tree eked out barely an inch of growth before being swallowed by sunflowers. It turns out that the tree giveaway card had a typo: white oaks grow 1-2 inches a year, not 1-2 feet. Rather than reaching my roof in 40 years, my oak will be the towering height of a fire hydrant. In contrast with the twiglet, my forest of sunflowers towered over the sidewalk, blooming in gold and auburn and sunburst swirls. One grew so giant, weighed down by its heavy head, that it threatened to topple all the rest.
There is a saying in gardening: you have to grow it to know it. No matter how much research you do, the only way to really know a plant is to sink your hands into the soil and watch what unfurls. This year I learned that I need to sort my bulbs and stake my sunflowers and read the fine print on height. The trying and failing and learning is the whole point.
As I follow the plot twists in my garden, I wonder again about the mistakes I made in marriage. Would I have left sooner if failing felt safer? What if we focused less on successes and celebrated starting over as much as sticking with it? What if adult life, like gardening, is all just trial and error? Then we are always free to uproot what doesn’t work—even when the consequences are steep—and joyfully begin again.
As for the precarious giant sunflower, I cut it down and hung it off my balcony for the birds. After all, a sunflower fail is just a feeder-in-waiting. To my ongoing delight, the neighborhood cardinal stops each morning to feast on the seeds, his jaunty red topknot catching in the sunrise. This morning he brought his mate. Look, he says to her, how nourishing this mistake is, and how delicious.
Other essays I loved recently on gardening and trying again:
life and death in the garden, from
, by Elissa Altman“Sometimes, Susan said, stuff just dies. It gets gorgeous, it looks perfect, everything is fine and great, and then other things decide that it's just as gorgeous as you think it is, and they get there first, usually the morning you're planning on going out with your little basket. It is what it is.”
Garden Mistakes Were Made, from the Garden Study thread on
, by Anne Helen Peterson“Nothing gives me as much quiet satisfaction as puttering around my plants. Part of the joy is watching things grow, change, fail. Part of it is just being deep in beauty. And part of it, too, is the puzzle of it all. Gardens are patient teachers. They’ve got nowhere else to go.”
The Tenderness of Trying, from
“The tenderness of trying is woven up in not knowing how it will go, not knowing whether success or failure or some combination will result, not knowing who I’ll be on the other side.”
One of the unexpected joys of starting over has been hearing from others on similar journeys. If something resonates with you, I’d love for you to leave a comment, drop me an email or share a post with a friend!
Liz is a writer and photographer based in Brooklyn.
“Would I have left sooner if failing felt safer? What if we focused less on successes and celebrated starting over as much as sticking with it? What if adult life, like gardening, is all just trial and error? Then we are always free to uproot what doesn’t work—even when the consequences are steep—and joyfully begin again.” This. This all day.
This was very reassuring to read! Just last night, Will and I went to our local garden center and bought a bunch of plants to put in front of our house. It's a project I've been avoiding since we moved in three years ago because 1) I know NOTHING about plants or growing things, and 2) the risk of failing at it (for the whole street to see) has felt too great. But now I'm excited! It was fun to follow my whimsy and pick out things I liked. Most of them are perennials, but even if they die, we can always replant. I'm letting it be an experiment! 🌿