Is gardening outdated

[BulbsAndLampsDiffer]

I live on an estate, on my road I am generally surrounded by couples/ single mums in their 30s and 40s. I am single mum try to maintain my garden both front and rear, paining fences, mowing the lawn and general weeding, so very cheap and easy. However when looking around I feel like the only one to be doing do with lots of weeds on driveways and un mown front gardens. I know it’s not a priority in modern busy life.
For convex some one said to me years ago it is impossible to have a tidy home, tidy child and tidy mum. And I do let myself slip in order to keep my home and child looking put together.
No judgment just curious if where I live is the norm.
YABU too busy to pull up weeds
YANBU pride in your garden

I'm sorry you lost your little furry friend x

I used to have a lawn full of clover and dandelions at my other house because my tortoise liked them. Sadly he didn't survive hibernation one winter. after I'd had him for 14 years.😢

@Morgenrot25 how is "if you can spend ten mins Mumsnetting you can weed" not sneering? You and other posters who have made comments about "no one is THAT busy" and "lazy" and "wrong priorities" demonstrate what's wrong with this world...an utter lack of empathy or imagination about how someone's life might involve challenges and circumstances that you are unfamiliar with or unaware of. It's absolutely right that people's priorities differ and no-one has the casting vote on the correct order outside of child related safety issues, certainly not the state of someone's driveway.

I actually really like gardening but don’t bother weeding paths! You would definitely hate our front garden but we garden for wildlife. Luckily our neighbours are very tolerant and haven’t commented.

Our messy patch in an otherwise concrete area fed loads of swifts and swallows though, you could see them coming down to grab the insects over our front garden.

Gardening died with the two wage household. Cost of livs and the fact most families have two people working means it’s not so popular. I would 100% love time to garden. It’s a luxury I (and many) just don’t have ! Raising a family while working… the plants can wait!

I first left our back lawn for the dandelions and clover (doing a couple of maintenance cuts a season). 10 years later it'sa mix of: self-heal, common violets, yellow rattle, forget-me-nots and various other native flowers i can't identify, as well as the grass. It doesn't get too tall as we're north facing. The main regular job is to manually remove any brambles that try to appear, and this year topup strategic water supplies for wildlife.
We have a huge variety of insects, butterflies and moths that weren't there before, and now apparently have enough food around the garden to support a hedgehog.

Some people love gardening. I'm not one of them. I figure the best I can do is manage it (a bit) for the wildlife near me.

I don’t think it’s outdated. It might be more that our outdoor spaces have changed. Greater urbanisation, less green space, more landscaping in gardens. Plus, yeah, people have less time and money to plough into their gardens.

Where we are in Canada "yards" are generally bigger than UK gardens. Most people just have grass, and it is mowed (using ride-on mowers) in the vast majority of cases. Vegetable gardens are pretty big here, but flowerbeds not so much. I have vegetables and a couple of large flowerbeds. We get the kids (11 and 9) to weed them. My son can't wait until he's old enough to start a mowing business.

I'm one of only a handful on our estate who has planted front and back gardens. The spaces are smallish, but I've done lots to them and I love my plants and trees. I encourage a more natural look (not messy though) and we have lots of birds and insects which visit. I've always loved a garden and made time even when the dcs were young and I was doing shifts. The gardens are the only places I actually feel relaxed and happy.

Most people's gardens round here are just paving stones and some grass. Nothing else. It looks so bland and desolate, with no possibility of wildlife.

Im not lazy but I dislike gardening and big gardens.

My OH insisted on buying properties with large gardens.

Im thinking of divorcing (not because of gardening).
I will be buying a apartment not a house with a big garden.

I like flowers Dahlia's are my fave. I got a potted pom pom Dahlia plant from a local grower thats the only nod to gardening from me.

If i won the lotto or upsize my dream is a condo or swanky duplex with no garden.

I couldnt stand a big garden.
If i wanted to see big posh gardens just go to a stately home or a walk.

I have noticed a lot of younger people with their first home are creating cottage style gardens rather than the Insta fake plastic lawn, plastic topiary look.

Rockeries are out though. Tried to give away some really nice rockery rocks and no one wanted them.

I'll be holding an open garden to raise funds for charity shortly. I'm proud of what I've created. It's size means there's always something that needs doing.
My garden is something I consider a sanctuary, where I spend each day (weather permitting) with my two dogs. I consider myself fortunate to enjoy it becaue I have a life limiting condition so obviously I'm quite ill. It's a catharsis and keeps me sane.

We had 80 feet of brambles so big they burst through the fence smashing it some were 6 inch diameter stems. After 10 years of the fence coming down and ruining our plants,DH offered to remove them, and we paid for a new fence (150 feet of it) we chatted to our solicitor who said put our own fence up inside theirs,we tried that, their broken fence smashed ours in wind and storms,we couldn't do it all the way along either because of trees. We didn't even get a thank you. The other side with the rusting vehicles, neighbours have talked about it for years, people complain and my neighbour said he saw someone taking pictures of the garden. Our last house we had to reduce from £250k, to £211k and everyone sited the state of the neighbours gardens for not wanting to buy. There's a big difference between a wildlife garden and overgrown.

It’s good for the soul to have a tidy garden, nothing more depressing than looking out on a mess 🙂

Not having time to do something isn't a new phemonina. A nice garden is a joy, those people clearly just don't value it.

To be fair the pavements aren't any better, absolutely full of weeds. I don't see why I should feel bad about the weeds in my front garden when the pavements are like a jungle.

Although my front garden is part paved and quite a large expanse of shingle, I do put pots out so the people opposite me have a much better view out the front of their houses that I do looking at theirs.

Tarmac or block paved drives with no pots, containers or any sign of a bit of garden with some plants for the bees and butterflies. There are not that many front gardens in my road that actually have anything remotely resembling a garden, it's all car parking.

The real downside is when it rains and you see rivers of water gushing into the gutters off these driveways, no wonder the bottom of the road flooded last year when we had torrential rain. If there's nowhere to soak up the rain it doesn't have much of an option but to run off all these acres of hard landscaping.

most people were i live have pots in their front gardens, hanging baskets
gardening is not outdated here.
garden centres are extremely popular

I think a lot of people enjoy nature and wild areas of greenery. It's better than the popular 'solution' of paving your garden over to keep it tidy. Nature isn't tidy, and it's good for the bees to let native plants such as dandelions grow. So long as you don't tidy your garden to death, it's not out of fashion though - there's just more ways of doing things these days.

I think people are just busy. My free time I like to exercise or do other hobbies to keep me sane. Over the years I've got more and more responsibilities (and kids) and it's just not a priority. I do mow my lawn and do a bit of weeding once a month or so in summer and I grow plants in the back garden.

I don’t think it’s outdated, I think lives have just become busier. Most households don’t have a stay at home parent so all the general household chores have to fit into evenings and weekends, leaving no time for gardening as well. And parents these days spend a lot more time doing kid-focused activities at the weekend, compared to my childhood where parents expected the kids to entertain themselves while they did things like gardening.

I’d like a lovely garden full of various plants. But I don’t have the time to learn all the stuff I’d need to know to plan one that I’d like and will flourish, or the time to get it planted or maintained.

I love gardening, and spend quite a bit of time doing it, despite working full time, two kids etc. But I was watching an old Gardener's World last night and they were washing the trunks of silver birch trees with brushes and warm water to get rid of algae and show the beautiful silver bark off, and I was thinking "stuff that, the whole point of gardening is to get out of doing cleaning and house work." I think the secret is just to find the level of commitment that works for you.

Are the gardens just weedy through neglect or purposefully allowed to go 'freestyle' for the sake of biodiversity which has become popular? If the latter, most 'freestyle' weeds don't do that much for pollinators. Mine is 'cultured freestyle' I e. I remove big, pernicious weeds, let the little ones ramble but also sow such as calendula, campion, poppies (field +breadseed), the odd lavender plant and just let it all do it's thing. Low maintenance & bees galore. Self-seeds itself too.

I hate gardening but I keep the weeds down, pay someone to mow the lawn once a month and have a few flowering shrubs for the butterflies/bees etc

Tip to get rid of weeds. Buy pure white vinegar, not the spray bottles from a supermarket, a 5litre container., about £6.00 . Do not dilute, weeds are dead within hours, especially with the weather we are having at the moment. I use it on my driveway, it is block paved and was constantly trying get up the weeds between the bricks, now l just pour the white vinegar into a watering can job done.