There’s something very precious about white flowers. Depending on the plant, colourful flowers can be showy and full of beauty, yet there’s something quietly majestic about the beauty of a pure white bloom.

Maybe it’s the fragility that’s the allure, the knowledge that at any moment the rain or cold might come and make the flower ugly.

The Value Of Beauty

I don’t consider myself to be one of the pretty people. I think I’m generally best viewed from a distance away and from behind a protective screen. It’s a good thing I have such a charming personality to make up for it…

The late-autumn Camellia ‘Nobilissima’

Society’s beauty standards horrify me. I’ve seen the horrific treatment of women, particularly famous young women, by the media and been appalled. Having been brought up to respect others I cannot fathom the audacity of newspapers and magazines when it comes to commenting on appearances. It’s a corrosive and ugly part of modern culture that brings misery to those on the receiving end of it.

There was a cover picture on the front of a horticultural trade magazine a few years ago of a young female groundswoman for a top UK golf course. She’d won an award or something and was pictured proudly smiling in front of a ride-on mower. I didn’t give the picture a second thought until a colleague drew my attention to the fact that no living human being could exist with a waist that small; they’d altered the picture on the front of a trade magazine to accentuate a young woman’s features. I doubt they do the same for the men they feature.

How Camellia ‘Nobilissima’ looks in most gardens for most of its season

But what does this have to do with gardening? Am I here to suggest that airbrushing and careful editing happens in gardening media?

The answer is yes. And it happens a lot. Now I’m not pointing the finger at tidying up holes in leaves or editing a picture to make sure that the colour of a flower is as accurate as possible. Contrary to popular belief, the camera does lie; it can be difficult to capture certain colours accurately for example.

Hydrangea ‘Hayes Starburst’ looks much more appealing on the nursery’s website than it does in the garden

As with editing in beauty magazines the question is how far is it acceptable to go in the name of perfection?

Cultivating Image

Some tricks to creating the perfect image are pretty easy. If you want to make it look as though a plant is free-flowering you group several together, and of course it’s easy to make small flowers look big by taking a close-up picture; with no reference point for scale how can you tell how big the flower or plant actually is?

Another basic trick is to grow the plant(s) to be photographed in a protected environment like a tunnel or glasshouse to protect leaves and blooms. It makes sense to do this, especially with delicate plants.

This variegated myrtle looks nice, but can you see a touch of green in the background? This plant is prone to reversion

Then there are more nuanced tricks, like editing images to make colours look more intense than they are. This is where an image really does cross the line; clever camera angles and carefully nurtured plants are one thing, but once you get into the realms of extensive digital enhancement you’re into a whole new murky area.

Yet judging by the performance of some of the recently introduced garden plants I would suggest that plant marketing companies are going too far. A lovely looking winter flowering ornamental cherry was recently launched in the UK; photos show clouds of delicate pure white flowers, but given how susceptible existing autumn/winter flowering cherries are to the British weather you just know that the reality of this tree will be disappointing.

But nurseries, and particularly plant marketing companies, need to sell plants. It’s their business to sell plants to people and they won’t be able to do that with pictures of weather-beaten flowers and damaged leaves. Beauty sells.

Why Does It Matter?

It would be easy to write this off as another reality of modern life, roll our eyes and move on. After all there is little that we can do as gardeners to push back.

Hardy bananas spend more of their year looking dreadful than looking good, but telling gardeners this isn’t good for business

Yet it matters because misrepresenting plants is leading gardeners to buy things that don’t live up to their image. Very few plants are at their best all year round, and even the best gardens will have weeks or months when they’re not at their prime. Selling the idea of the garden beautiful is lucrative business for nurseries and garden media alike, but it sells a lie. The more confident and experienced gardeners will see straight through the veil of deceit and won’t be taken in, but what about the newer gardeners who look at the perfect plants and gardens they’re shown and wonder why their own isn’t like that?

Most gardeners will assume that the miserable plant in their garden is down to a problem with their garden, not that the plant has essentially been mis-sold. It would take quite some nerve to take on a major grower and argue that the plant in your garden is representative of reality while all their publicity images are not.

Obviously nurseries want to sell their plants, and obviously that’s more likely to happen if pictures show the plant at its best and not at its worst.

Pictures of Impatiens tinctoria focus on its pretty flowers, not its tall bare stems and knobbly knees!

But where do we draw the line between what is fair for nurseries and what is fair for gardeners? Making nurseries tell us how they got their plants to look good – “this plant is actually five plants grown in a climate-controlled glasshouse” – isn’t going to happen, but by the same token gardeners need to know what they can reasonably expect from their purchase.

One thing is clear though; it’s primarily the new plants that are being helped along with carefully choreographed marketing images. Once a plant has been around for a while its flaws become well-known and harder to keep secret. Having a flaw doesn’t mean a plant isn’t valuable and beautiful, but at the same time we know that our plants won’t always be at their very best. Creating an over-hyped and sensationalised impression of how garden plants should look and behave simply makes gardeners feel like they’re failing in some way. It’s unfair.

Plants, like people, can’t always be at their best; this doesn’t take away from their overall beauty and value. It might just pay to remember that the pictures of plants we see aren’t necessarily representative of reality.