This Month’s Featured Article

In January this year I left the garden I felt I had spent my whole life creating. In reality it was just the last 13 years, but emotionally it had been a lifetime of waiting for the opportunity, and it had then taken pretty much every minute of those 13 years.

What started as a very personal project somehow morphed into the basis for a cut flower and floristry business, a successful Instagram account, and a place on the Garden Conservancy’s Open Day tours. It was written about in magazines, and I regularly gave talks about its creation.

As anyone who has sat through one of my talks can attest, I had not planned for any of that to happen. My photos of “Before” and for the first few years consist of a bunch of feral kids running around using Salisbury Wines bags as baskets during Easter egg hunts. (No need for aspersions on either my mothering or party prep skills, thank you.) The greatest irony of the scope of its unexpected success was that it led to me spending so much time on other people’s gardens and flowering that I did not have enough time to look after it.

That was far from the only reason we made the decision to move, but it was a factor. As I sit here now at the end of February, waiting for the umpteenth snowstorm of the winter to pass through, I am trying to bear that in mind as I start planning our new garden. That along with several other hard-learned lessons that are worth sharing.

Think hard about what YOU want to do

I never want to dampen anyone’s enthusiasm when it comes to gardening, but let’s hold your horses for just one second. Because before we get on to the exciting bit of actually planting our gardens, it is worth spending time to think about the bigger picture.

Before anything else, let’s establish what you think about your garden. Do you look at the space around your house and think, “this is a yard I need to control” or “this is an extension of my house, my home, and me; an opportunity for creativity; a chance to continually learn; and a new avenue of purpose”? If it’s the former, maybe just skip to the next article here.

Next up, are you – and no shame here – someone who wants to hand responsibility to a landscaper, or are you going to get your own hands dirty? You may long for a beautiful garden but for time, health, or practical reasons need someone else to help you with it. Gardening isn’t just about planting and weeding. The roots of a successful garden are in its planning and editing. No gloves required for those.

Bringing in the experts

Two caveats here though, good landscape professionals are in high demand. Their schedules are entirely at the mercy of the season and its weather. You may well have to wait to get on their schedules. If they come highly recommended, that wait is well worth it. The first person I called when we found our new house was my landscaper, who I had worked with almost from the start of our last garden. Before we went any further with this house purchase, I needed to know if he would still help me here. (He said yes and here we are. And yes, I will share. His name is Jason Emberlin, and if he and his team have the time to work for you, you will have won the jackpot.)

The second piece of advice is that once you have secured your person, treat them like royalty. I often hear a dismissive tone in people’s voices when talking about landscapers. But chances are they have grown up locally and have been doing this a very long time. In other words, they know more about our climate; our changing environment; the best resources; and our local plants, trees, pests and disease than us Johnny-come-latelies are ever going to. They are experts in what they do. Use them and treat them as such.

Time to spare

Also have you thought about how much time you want and have to spend in your garden? Not the sitting-around-admiring-it time, but how much of your free time are you prepared to spend working in it? There’s no right or wrong answer, but being realistic about this from the get go is crucial to the amount of enjoyment you are going to glean from your garden. Gardening can take a lot of time in this climate – not all year but alas not in a calm continuous steady way. More stop-and-wait, stop-and-wait, stop-and-wait, zero-to-90 hair-on-fire, collapse-in-a-heap way.

Be overly optimistic about how much you can manage and how long everything will take, and you can easily find the garden running out of hand and you feeling overwhelmed and cursing whosever idea this was anyway. Be realistic, and don’t take on too much to start with. Grow your ambitions hand in hand with your actual garden.

Are we there yet?

Also, be realistic about how much time your garden will actually take to grow. Not this season but over the years. Maybe on AI you can create an instant garden, but in real life gardens take a long time to truly establish. The best gardens are built on patience.

There are many things that make me sad to have left our old garden but perhaps the greatest was leaving behind the trees that we planted as tiny whips and that had, over the years, grown into full, mature trees. It’s not just the relinquishing of the actual trees themselves that hits hard – we can easily replant the same here – but the time it took for them to establish as they did. That time, we are never getting back.

The best time to plant a tree

There is an adage that the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The next best time is today. And it’s also worth remembering the Chinese proverb that a society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit. While you may just be planning a few raised beds of vegetables, don’t be scared of legacy planting too. You can create something that may give joy to others one day.

So consider if you have the wherewithal to plant one or two small trees. Eating your own home-grown tomatoes is a very particular joy, but I promise you nothing compares to the magnificence of year-on-year watching a small sapling metamorphose into a majestic beauty. The first thing we will be planting here in the new garden will be trees.

Success in planning

While this winter is lasting forever, it might seem that gardening is off the table right now. Not a bit of it. Now is the time to decide what you are game for trying this year. Winter is for planning, and without a plan, we are not going to be prepared. If relevant, contact your landscaper and share those plans so you’re on their schedules. Order your seeds and get ready to start sowing. Look for bare root plant, shrub, and possibly tree suppliers. Make decisions now so that you are ready to roll the moment the soil temperature starts to rise. Good things come to those who wait. Better things come to those who plan. •

Pom Shillingford is an obsessive gardener based in Salisbury, CT. She offers both garden design and event floristry services through English Garden Grown. Find her at englishgardengrown.com or on Instagram at @english_garden_grown.