Recently, I attended a garden seminar at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum in Chanhassen. I love attending garden seminars mostly because I’m a flower geek and I love to be around people who like to talk flowers as much as I do. Plus there is always something to learn about new cultivars, different trends and general tips and tricks. This particular seminar was on container gardening and I did take lots of notes on new plants for next spring and some great ideas on container combinations. The idea, however, that really stuck with me is that no matter how much experience, education or eye for design one has, complete and total flops still happen. A lot.
This was not the topic of any speaker but most spoke on their garden failures as well as their successes. I heard from a professor of horticulture to seed representatives to a landscape designer. Failure is a part of gardening and they all had the pictures to prove it!
The horticulture professor worked on annual trials throughout Minnesota. He and his students planted trial beds in 3 locations across the state. In addition, they also did trials of different container combinations. There were many, many successes both in the trial beds and in the containers. And several flops. The professor seemed particularly proud of the containers using gladiolas. They did not work. At all. He had many pictures of these “failures”. It seemed like a good idea. Glads in containers as a vertical element. Why wouldn’t that work? It just…didn’t.
The difficulty in gardening, particularly when trying to combine plants is that plants don’t always cooperate. Even when you take into account growth habit, water, fertilizer and light requirements and the design looks good on paper and particularly in your head sometimes it just doesn’t work. There’s no exact science to it. There is nowhere where trial and error is more in play than in the garden. If this gentleman who teaches this stuff is still making mistakes and proud of it, then I’m on the right track.
While it seemed almost each speaker talked of some disappointments in the garden, no one hit that idea home more than the landscape design company owner. She had 30 years of experience designing landscapes and containers for her clients. 30 years! Her pictures showed one gorgeous container after another but my favorite part of her presentation was the pictures of containers gone awry. There was one combination that seriously looked like a brain that had been sliced in half. I doubt that was the look she was going for but she took it all as a matter of course. Yes, most of the containers were gorgeous but still, even after 30 years, every once in a while there’s one that is just an epic fail.
I think why all these gardeners are so at ease with failure is that it’s just one more thing they now know about gardening. Gladiolas don’t work in containers. A spike between two mums looks like a dissected brain. They’ve accepted that no matter now much experience or knowledge they have plants aren’t always going to perform as expected and that things on paper don’t always come out as planned. And really? A combo planting that doesn’t exactly work is still not that ugly. It’s still comprised of plants which are beautiful in their own right. And all this “failure” does is open the door for them, you, and me to create something a whole lot better next time.
Check out some of my failures here, here, here and here.
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