Gardening disasters

Life lessons from my many horticultural errors

I promise I’m not trying to take you down a doom spiral, what with last week’s sweary rant, but as the nights draw in and the news gets bleaker, the last thing you need is me bragging about how brilliant my garden is when frankly, the failures are just a lot more entertaining. ¹

I shall unveil a few of my disasters for you now. Feel free to share your own. We can always blame climate change and hold our horticultural heads up high.

1. Pathetic pumpkins

I did grow a nice little pumpkin, once. It appeared all by itself - I assume from a discarded Jack o Lantern in the compost which ended up as mulch. It spread across the lawn in search of the vanishing light and furnished me with a small, very halloweeny pumpkin just in time for the end October.

But every time I have actually tried to grow a pumpkin on purpose has ended in humiliation. This was never more the case when I was actually employed to grow vegetables for a real restaurant, keeping quiet that I had only passed the veg part of my RHS diploma by the skin of my teeth². Brassicas proved to be my main foe (more on that later) but I was pretty confident of my cucurbit abilities and pledged to have pumpkins spilling out of pots, sprawling from raised beds and generally turn the growing area into some kind of All Hallows paradise.

This, regrettably, was 2024. The year when the sun shone about three times. The year when I actually started weeping when I checked the weather one dismal spring morning. The weather did not much improve by mid summer and pumpkins, it turns out, didn’t enjoy it any more than I did. The growing site was a bit odd - largely shaded, sandy soil - but I’d been making barrows of compost enriched with chicken bedding and manure and the newest, longest grow bed seemed like it would be a sure bet. After all the courgettes in it were spilling all over the place.

I also tried growing pumpkins in the polytunnel and had some excellent wavy vines curling all over the place but actual fruits? Only one, dear reader. This one.

Cute, isn’t it? I patiently cleared the leaves, nestled it into some straw and waited for the magic to happen. Instead, a mouse happened. I arrived to work to find the whole thing absolutely gone. I produced a grand sum of zero pumpkins and am frankly mystified about how anyone else managed to do it. Pumpkin growers, whatever your witchcraft is, I salute you.

2. Sad Sambucas

What is the problem with this poor little Sambucas? It is three years old. It is apparently happy in pretty much all soils. Except for mine. It has been mulched, it is in part sun and it had some decent dunks of water over the summer. But still it shrivels.

Expectation and reality.

My best guestimate is that it is a bit fed up with the aster - as are most of the plants in my garden - and needs more room, a decent mulch - a bit of love and attention, essentially. So that’s my plan for the autumn, but I do hope I won’t be telling you about its imminent demise in a year’s time. Unlike the other casualties in my garden at least this tree isn’t actually big enough to fall over yet.

3. Drunk gaura

The bottomless brunch of planting decisions. Just because you can put a plant in part shade and it won’t die doesn’t mean it is a good idea. Gaura is one of those plants that nurseries and garden centres claim can handle shade and they can - they will even flower. But they will flower in a really annoying, falling down drunk fashion. I managed to grow mine from seed and was delighted they grew so readily but the grand late summer finale was rather spoiled by the fact they looked like such a mess.

There is a happy ending to this tale though. I just dug them all up and put them in my very sun loving gravel garden where they are standing up all by themselves like the upstanding members of society that we knew they were all along.

4. The mystery of the vanishing echinacea

It’s not a mystery really. They just don’t like my garden. Grown again, lovingly and naively, from seed on the windowsill of our house during Covid. Into the ground in our new house they went, where they sat with nothing but leaves for the first whole year. Imagine my excitement the following year for the forthcoming explosion in bright, peppy blooms. It would look exactly like Trentham, surely!

Beautiful ecinaceas at Birmingham Botanical Gardens, Trentham and Pensthorpe. And my sad little specimen.

Reader, I got two flowers and the following winter the whole lot completely disappeared. Perhaps they tunnelled under the ground to find an actual Piet Oudolf setting and not my sad little imitation. More likely, they just didn’t like the weather and my soil, and felt it would be preferable to just die than sit through another year of it.

Because I am an idiot, I bought more Echinaceas this summer, where I’ll be trialling in my full sun gravel garden in the hope that treating them mean will keep them if not keen, but perhaps still in existence. I am not feeling confident.

5. Bare roots

Bare roots are better for the planet than buying pot-grown plants. They come in paper packaging with no soil, you bung them in the ground and by the summer, presto, you have gorgeous perennials thriving in your garden.

Unless you realise halfway through the year that you planted them upside down.

I still do not have any Echinops.

6. Not very perennial chillies

Anyone studying horticulture will undoubtedly have a bit of a cocky phase. ‘Oh, its only an annual in our stupid climate’, we tell ourselves, feeling a bit pleased about global warming all of a sudden. ‘If I can only trick it into thinking we live in Mexico it will just go dormant and reappear’. The first year, this actually did work with some seed grown chillies. They stayed on a warm windowsill and really did flower and fruit again the following year. But after that, they’d had enough. So its back to the tedious seed sowing this January for me.

7. My ‘home grown’ show garden plants

Show garden newbies have an adorable naivity. They will grow many of the plants themselves, they will claim, not taking into account the fact spring will not arrive until the first day of the build, and that they are not a professional nursery, or even have a functional greenhouse. Earlier this week I finished planting out some of the hundreds of alliums I had painstakingly potted into compost last winter for my summer show border. Three of them actually flowered in time. Out of 30. Now Autumn is coming they are all shooting out roots again so I think they are alive - just had a bit of stagefright. Hopefully they’ll feel brave enough to perform for me next spring when a gold medal is not depending on them.

My oddly short Allium Christophii flowers. All three of them.

8. Frostbitten salvia

Salvias. Roses. Clematis. All three of these plants have me in a perpetual state of confusion no matter how many times Monty explains it. Roses and clematis at least have a variety of types and rules on pruning which my hyperactive little brain refuses to pay attention to. But the only issue with salvias is understanding if they are hardy or not. If they’re not hardy, they need to come into the greenhouse in the winter, or possibly onto a window ledge. I know this, and yet my salvias still never seem to make it. Naturally I’ve just bought a tender one because it was discounted and I’m going to wrap it up in wool and keep it in the greenhouse just so I can experience that crushing disappointment next spring when it bites the dust.

9. The wrong trees

Please don’t judge me for humblebragging about my show garden. But this summer I created my first show garden, and it won a gold medal. But it would have been a platinum had not I chosen The Wrong Trees.

I chose the wrong trees because the nursery who kindly offered to lend me trees (unlike all the others who wanted me to buy them for several hundred pounds each in the expectation I could somehow sell them without owning a van for delivery, or having any actual money) were visiting their supplier on a day when I had to look after my kids.

So the trees they chose weren’t exactly what I was after, which was dainty multi stemmed Cornus Kousas. Instead they bought striking but chunky Cornus Kousas. They were absolutely stunning, and one of them was so enormous it would have overwhelmed the border so I got them to deliver it to my house instead. This was not a failure. It’s bloody gorgeous and I can’t wait to plant it.

My show garden was all about the relationship between the end of life and new beginnings of it. In the centre was a log spiral (one of the casualties of my own garden) rotting down, with plants growing up through the logs. The log bit, and the plants, made loads of sense. But the trees were chosen because 1. They were free, 2, They were trees and 3. They would look pretty in June, when the show was.

My final walk around the garden after the build. I walked three miles every day during the build inspecting that little square!

All through the build I kept roping passing landscapers into helping me twist the pots and rearrange them and all through the build I knew the trees, while gorgeous, weren’t quite right. I hoped nobody would notice. The judges did notice. Immediately. They told me they were too striking for the rest of the planting scheme, and their effect jarred with the rest of the story. They could see what I could not, which was that I’d chosen them for all the wrong reasons. And for that reason I didn’t get a platinum, but a gold medal instead. It made no difference to the public. Literally the only thing anyone would ask me was what those gorgeous trees were.

10. Basically all brassicas

We all know how ridiculous food prices have become. But while my husband grumbles at the tripling price of humble basics like cabbage and broccoli, I can’t help but feel it is justified. Growing brassicas without them being swallowed whole by any passing creature is, in my view, nothing short of a complete miracle. This may, possibly, be connected to how badly I did in that fruit and veg RHS exam.

But reader, I really tried. I bought the poshest mesh. I pinned it down. I put wool and ash around to keep slugs off. Still they persisted. My pak choi was a massacre. The cabbages - well they actually did keep going but they were packed with slugs and never seemed to be ready to eat. Cauliflower was a complete disaster, I lost count of how many turnips bolted. Broccoli stood no chance.

I will say thought that Cavolo nero - that fabulous dark leaved brassica essential for a ribollita or good minestrone - was sturdy, frost proof and pretty much bug proof. It could withstand a nibble and keep going, with a steady supply of un-nibbled winter leaves. I also found rainbow chard to be similarly indestructible but that’s probably because it’s not a brassica and also because nobody apart from me seemed to actually like it.

So that’s it. My personal horticultural house of horrors. Next time I promise to stop wallowing and tell you something useful. I’m thinking about my growing aeonium collection and how propagation has allowed me to stick to my promise not to buy any more houseplants (but have more houseplants anyway). Have a good week!

1. Particularly after reading Ben Probert’s brilliant Garden Rant article in which he points out pretending to have nothing but success in the garden is not really the best idea. Ben, I hope this confessional proves to you that I am a wildly authentic gardener with a long record of cocking things up.

2. Reader, I still don’t completely understand what a triploid apple tree is.