Bit disheartened and here for a whinge ...everything in the garden isn't rosey

[70isaLimitNotaTarget]

We had some garden work done this Spring , the bottom of the garden flooded badly . We had paving , turf and a drainage system.
So new plants :

I bought some young plants to grow on and some seeds ( I have a mini greenhouse) in the spring

The Good:
new grass - growing brilliantly
climbing roses on an arch
passionflower (££ one)
hop
night scented stock
boston creeper
nastursiums from seed , flowers I don;t like but Cabbage Whites do . I planted them early so I had loads of leaves and flowers......not a hint of the picky little winged turncoats . Not a single caterpillar or eggs

The Bad
begonias- grew from plugs , planted in a big pot - dead
fuschia -grew from plugs , planted out when good size - I have 1/6 . I think they got dug up by foxes or cats
Ceanothus - two of them . eaten
Clematis from a tiny plant , grew really well by a tree then it wilted amd shrivelled
Ground cover ( ? saxifragia) shabby.
Sweetpeas from seed - started well then meh . ( Lovely deep pot , feed , trellis , sun ) all dead
A plant that was supposed to be a Passionflower but really small, growing ok but the leaves are nothing like my other one so I;m not sure .

The weeds in the border are having a riot . We're goung to strim them and put down membrane . No weedkiller we have cats .

I deliberately didn;t spend ££ as its a new garden area .
Happy to grow from seed but I;m just underwhelmed .

I sympathise. I feel a little the same about my garden. I have to remind myself that it takes time, trial and error and no two years are the same - what looked good last year is rubbish this year etc. Keep plugging away and it will pay dividends I'm sure.

I think it's been a TOUGH year this year! My garden isn't so bad but my allotment is shit!

I always blame the weather. It was scorchio early, then wetter than ever. The coldest spring, and really gloomy. Now very hot interspersed with very damp. No wonder loads of bought-in, new plants are suffering!

Whereas weeds are native plants, suited to your exact location so of course they'll probably be relatively happy.

Ps cabbage whites will be here in a few weeks...

I’m finding plug plants hit and miss as well. I had plugs of:

• heuchera - 5/6 survived to plant out and doing well. 1 just shrivelled in the pot during growing on
• echinacea - 6/6 grew on, planted out and doing well
• dwarf lupins - 1/6!!!! They all grew on beautifully in pots but then when I planted them out, they’ve just disappeared one by one! I don’t know if they’re being eaten or what. There’s one still there. So weird.

Clematis Wilt is a thing, fungal infection www.gardenersworld.com/how-to/solve-problems/clematis-wilt/ I think with all the wet humid weather we’ve had this is probably bad this year. I have a clematis Taiga that I was super excited about, and it’s massively underwhelming so far, growing very slowly and looking quite spindly. Going to keep nursing it and not worry too much about what it does this year, look after the roots and hope that next year it is better!

Sounds like you’re having issues with things in pots - were they under or over watered? Allowed to dry out? Could your compost be affected by aminopyralid contamination? www.rhs.org.uk/advice/profile?pid=477

There are different species of passionflower and some do look very different. I have a very poorly Passiflora alata (supposedly) that I bought off eBay and it’s leaves are nothing like the classic P.caerula/P.edulis and hybrids that I’m used to. Perhaps we bought from the same duff source.

I find gardening a great metaphor for life in general. Some things go to plan, some don’t, some do better than you expected, some fail. It’s never finished, it’s a constant work in progress. It can be a joy and a frustration simultaneously! You’re always learning and building on past experience. What works for someone else may not work for you. However things are going though, keeping going in the garden is always good for my mental health. Even when my puppy managed to kill all my butternut squash plants by playing in the veg bed and standing on all the stems 🤬…..well, it meant I had more room for the sweet potato plants I over-ordered. Swings and roundabouts, and I learned a bit of mental resilience in training myself to see the silver lining rather than just staying mad and upset about loosing the squashes! Puppy being very cute helps with that of course too.

Keep gardening OP!!! I’m reclaiming my garden from weeds step by step - removing as many as I can hand-weeding and digging out roots of perennials, then putting a mulch of cardboard down covered in a thick layer of spent mushroom compost, watering it all well and then planting into that. So far - oldest beds I’ve done this with are 3-4 months - going really well, minimal weeds re-appearing that can just be pulled up/hoe-d quickly and easily once a week or so maximum. Nothing like on my old allotment when I’d just dig beds over, you’d turn around and they’d be weedy again. The thick mulching is the key I think, à la Charles Dowding’s no-dig method.

It’s been a really weird year for the garden IMO

Some stuff died due to too much rain I think

Gardening is trial and error, next year grow more of the stuff that worked well for you this year, snd try some new things

Imo, the best bet for the long term is perennials that suit your soil type. For example, my garden has lots of chalk and stones, and lots of sun (apart from this year) and roses, lavender, Choisia, thym do well. Some plants preferring acid soil/shade have all failed though.

Pots are also much harder to keep going

Perennials suited to soil type and position (sun shade) can grow deep roots and over the years will establish themselves so they can weather a bad spring

Good lyck

I’ve got a new garden area this year and the plants aren’t doing much this year but I think the first year they are setting up root systems. I’m hoping in the next couple years it’ll look more to how I imagine it to be.

There are different species of passionflower and some do look very different. I have a very poorly Passiflora alata (supposedly) that I bought off eBay and it’s leaves are nothing like the classic P.caerula/P.edulis and hybrids that I’m used to. Perhaps we bought from the same duff source. P. alata has simple oval leaves.

Even experienced gardeners have disasters. The difference is they usually realise in retrospect what went wrong so don't ask advice, so you never hear about it.

And it's never long until your garden is "full". so you're secretly pleased when a shrub dies unexpectedly - look at the size of that planting opportunity!

I seem to remember that the advice with Clematis is not to plant out tiny plants but to grow them on in a pot for a year first, that way they have a better chance of surviving.

@Theteapotsbrokenspout

I seem to remember that the advice with Clematis is not to plant out tiny plants but to grow them on in a pot for a year first, that way they have a better chance of surviving.

This is a good idea. I do something similar with cheap, smaller plants and those I find in the ‘Sad Plant ‘ section. Often it is the root system that is letting the plant down and needs TLC.

I’ll remember that for future re clematis - although it was a pretty decent size I bought. She’s planted against a west facing brick wall, and I built up with some roof slates around the roots so the soil/mulch is deeper there. Making sure she gets water (as sometimes the rain doesn’t soak right close to the wall), planted with a feed including mycorrhizal. It’s probably just that she’s a baby.

I reckon the sweetpeas and the border got waterlogged which saw them off

I had a clematis in a big pot for years (Nelly Moser) but it died off ..
If I do plant another one its going in a pot .

Might have another go at sweetpeas .

It has been a hit&miss time weatherwise .
Still no Cabbage Whites though

I've had a terrible year with slugs and snails destroying most of my bulbs and all of the dahlias. They also ate all of the baby's breath seedlings but I've got some more that are growing. A slight consolation is that I've got a lot of ladybirds living in my roses keeping the aphids in check but I still need the rain to stop battering the flowers!

The only truly bomb proof flowers I've managed to grow this year are the cosmos I grew from a packet of Johnson's seeds I picked up in the supermarket. The attached picture are flowers from the sensation mix.

I think that dead plants and disappointments are a big part of gardening...

Some of my lovely collection of Cabbage Whites , the first group are about 2" long and eating like locusts . And there are some smaller ones .
Still plenty of nastursium leaves and some flowers .

It has been a very dispiriting year, hasn't it. It rained heavily during the whole of May where I live and the garden just has not taken off at all this summer at all. Some stuff is only just come into flower and some stuff hasn't flowered at all.

The slugs and snails have been off the scale and have eaten everything else!

My beans have either been eaten by something or the ones that were doing well have now been snapped where foxes went for the netting. My new raspberry canes haven't thrived (lots of leaves, no fruit). Slugs and snails have enjoyed more than one plant I got for the flower beds. It's so discouraging!

OTOH, I have managed a lot of tomatoes and the butternut squash may actually be a triffid because it's huge.

Even my mint plants died ive lost two lots of sage 8 mints thyme has died my other thyme just has bits on the edges my hedging is OK on one side of the garden dead looking on the other even my grass is looking odd

I can grow nettles apparently

Theunamedcat, please can you come and cast your evil eye on my mint?! It burst its way out of its pot and rampaged through my entire herb patch.
OP, sometimes plants play dead for a while to fool you, then magically recover when you have paid a fortune for replacements.
I had two bay trees and a 40 year old fuchsia tree which “died” for five months after a minus 18C winter (Scotland). All now flourishing, new leaves belatedly sprouting all over the dead branches.
Gardening is very much the triumph of hope over experience, but the odd success keeps us going! The prolonged drought up here this summer meant that I finally gained ground on my ground elder infestation, as I could fork it out faster than it could regrow.

My Gran - an excellent gardener - would also say the same thing when asked for tips.

"To be a good gardener, you must be an eternal optimist, even in the face of overwhelming evidence telling you not to be".

It has been a tough year this year

It’s been a crap year for the garden. I’ve started clearing stuff ready to shut down for winter already and I don’t usually start this until the end of September. My sweet peas were a disaster this year (and I grew a load of them as well) only 3 of my rudbeckia made it from a whole packet of seeds, my Chinese rhubarb has died along with my acer. My passionflower didn’t come back this year and neither did my hot lips. The only things that have done well this year have been my dahlias.

It has been a great year for bindweed... My runner beans are ok. The neighbourhood cats dug up all my nepeta. Courgettes are doing brilliantly, dahlias distinctly underwhelming. I love the sound of your scented plants @70isaLimitNotaTarget I would love to do similar. What on earth ate your ceanothus? I have two, a large 6 year old one and a smaller 2 year old white variety and love them, they have given me no problems though.

I have a looong border to sort as my husband and the fencers had different ideas to me about the height of said (expensive) fence and now I need to create some sort of privacy screen.

blackcat I have no idea , we planted them ( decent sized ones abut 8" high ) then the leaves shrivelled and we were left with branched that vanished

On the plus side , I have about 12 really fat Cabbage White caterpillars . Did I mention that I really dislike nastursiums ? And only grow them for Cabbage Whites ? They've grown great guns and been eaten as designed . My caterpillars wil find a safe space soon to transform.