Once you take gardening from a casual activity to a more serious pursuit, as a hobby or even a career, you become acutely aware of the role personal taste plays.

Some gardeners like bright colours while others prefer subtlety. Some gardeners prefer a relaxed gardening style while for others only formality will do.

This is a fascinating topic covered in numerous gardening books and magazines.

Changing Tastes

We all change over time. We kid ourselves that we’re the same as we were in our youth, but events in our lives change our outlook.

Someone had fun making this living garden shelter

When you’re new to gardening you try to do everything. It doesn’t matter how much space you have for herbs, vegetables, trees, shrubs, herbaceous plants and bulbs, the aim is to have them all. It’s exciting to be a new gardener growing things for the first time.

As time passes you settle into the garden style of your preference.

Overt Vs Intimate

When I was a new gardener I absolutely loved big.

Big gardens with big flower borders and big plants. Oh how these things excited me!

The iconic borders at Wisley are made to impress you

But I’ve changed, and I’ve come to realise that big and flamboyant gardens no longer hold the same appeal for me.

I visit the Royal Horticulture Society’s main garden at Wisley, just west of London, and struggle to be moved by it.

I admire Wisley for its scale and the high standards that the gardeners attain. There’s in interesting plant collection too, and obviously for a plant nerd like me that holds an appeal. Yet I don’t feel any sort of emotions when I visit. I look and I see, but I don’t feel.

Emotional Issue

Humanity is vital in a garden.

A garden without people is no garden at all; a garden is a place where the gap between the human race and the natural world is bridged.

Gardens are also places that represent the people who create them. They should be quirky and filled with personal significance, rather than just being show-pieces to entertain others.

Over time I’ve come to prefer a more intimate style of gardening

This is why I feel a bit empty when I visit gardens created or managed solely as attractions; in order to cater for the tastes of as many people as possible, ‘entertainment gardens’, for want of another expression, try to replace their humanity with big and bright things.

One Person’s Vision

The Scottish Rhododendron expert and garden writer Ken Cox has an interesting expression. He tells us that the best gardens are created through “benign dictatorship”.

By this he means that gardens are created by one person, occasionally two, with singular vision. Everything is laid out and arranged for the benefit of the garden’s creator(s).

 

This is how human gardens come about; rather than seeking to make gardens that everyone will find at least partially enjoyable, gardens are made to reflect their creators, and meeting the garden feels more like meeting the gardener themselves.

This was supposed to be a pink begonia but its owner really likes it anyway

With the best will in the world you don’t get this intimacy in gardens created by committees for the benefit of nobody specific.

Give Me Humanity

Give me an imperfect garden.

Give me a hotchpotch of plants lovingly tended. Give me pet projects. Give me imperfect lawns and a slightly random statue.

Give me that jarring bright pink rose handed down from a grandparent’s garden, a plant that doesn’t really fit but is kept for its sentimental value.

It’s very pink….

I salute those who create and tend perfect gardens, but I will always be drawn to gardens that have a bit of personality and soul.