Over enthusiastic unknowledgeable gardener

[Imnoonesfool]

we moved into our house almost 3 years ago and went from having a pretty small garden with hardly any plants to having quarter of an acre very mature garden. We have spent quite a bit having it landscaped which has meant moving of existing plants, keeping lots of established plants but have also spent a fair wack on lots of new plants.

my husband loves pottering around in the garden but we are both pretty inexperienced gardeners. I have a plant app on my phone so I will pretty much look up anything I am unsure of and google (or ask my mum) on how to care for it.

Every year without fail my husband will dig up or chop down numerous plants and shrubs because he either thinks they are dead/thinks they are weed etc.

last year he went out and cut down to ground level all our beautiful Hydrangeas Annabelle’s that lined our front garden. I was gutted. My mum and I then spent ages planted a load of tiny plants that she had grown as ground coverage under a large area. He then went out a few weeks later and cleared the lot as he thought they were weeds.
I get so upset and have said you can’t just go round hacking at things or digging things up and he agrees and says he was only trying to help etc
this morning he has gone out and basically obliterated quite a few plants which he said he was dead heading. Again one large beautiful plant he has taken right down to the ground (where it was just starting to have green shoots) as he thought that’s what you should do. Taking probably 6 years of growth off it.

I could nearly cry!!

LTB!

Obviously, I'm kidding, has he never heard the adage 'measure twice, cut once'? It can be modified to apply to gardening as well. I commend his for his enthusiasm, if it could be better directed. Does he have power tools he wants to play with?

First ban your DH from doing any gardening, apart from mowing the lawn. Then start him on a programme of re education, that only allows access to the garden on strict supervision.
Your Annabelle hydrangeas should regrow stronger and full of blooms. I prune mine down every year. Not recommended for other types of hydrangeas.

DH once hacked down my gorgeous 30-year-old wall trained camellia thinking it was ivy. I have never forgiven him. He is not allowed to do anything in the garden unless I am outside with him and tell him exactly what and where he can chop.

Omg. You've reminded me of my dh. I was out at the shops and he phoned me to say that some random bloke had knocked on the door offering to trim any trees. Dh let him in and he cut EVERY branch off our mature silver birch including reducing the trunk to 8ft tall! There was one tiny pathetic little branch left about 3ft long. It was massacred. I was absolutely furious. That was the last time he was allowed to do anything in the garden.

I wouldn't curb your dh's enthusiasm but direct him into growing seedlings and perhaps creating a veg bed of his own. And have a rule that you'll show him how much he can chop and where for the rest.

This would drive me up the wall.

Hydrangea annabel comes back even if cut to the ground.

I feel your pain. I always ‘joke’ that I am terrified of falling asleep in the garden in case DH chucks me on the compost. For years he could not get into his head that the dry stick looking clematis were not dead. If I saw him go into the garden with secateurs I would leap after him. I forbade him to do anything unless under supervision.

He is a lot better, but last year he hacked away at my beautiful twisted Robinia while I was out. You would think after 55 years of marriage he would learn.

This is what lawns are for, to keep DHs busy in the garden without them injuring anything else.

Oh, goodness, you have my sympathy!

I have been with DP for 8 years and I am only just getting her to stop automatically getting the shears out (or, which is also annoying, 'tying back' things that do not need or want to be tied back!). For years she would be mortally offended if I suggested she might not be doing the right thing and would insist that 'her way' was just as valid as 'my way'.

(I work in a plant nursery and I have been gardening since I was a toddler; she is still stubbornly insistent that the plants she inherited from her grandmother's garden are called 'old roses' because her grandfather bought the originals in the 1940s.)

Take the secateurs off him and prune his dangly bits, that'll slow his gallop 😉

Can you buy a lockable cabinet for all the secatura and loppers?

Also make him watch gardeners world

Is my husband living a double life? This is exactly what my DH does. Bloomin' nightmare. Hacks away at all the good stuff and ignores any genuine jobs that need doing like digging over the vegetable bed or pulling out random stray saplings from the lawn or doing some hardcore weeding. Nope just gets out the big electric tools and starts obliterating my plants. Used to have a gorgeous variegated plant draping over the wall from next door. At the start of lockdown, I'd have by morning coffee in the garden and sit and admire it. He cut it right back level with the top of the wall. It has never come back. He's good at DIY type stuff - painting the summer house, laying patio, but needs keeping away from plants.

Your responses have made me chuckle 🤭

DH used to do this but has learned its not worth the bollocking. He now asks first.

I have just had to let our gardener go. He's very nice and reliable but he hasn't a clue. He does the opposite and just slightly tinkers with stuff that needs actual management because he doesn't know what he's doing. Then when I explain what to do he parrots it all back to me as if he's teaching me!

aaaahgghhhhh!

“direct him into growing seedlings”

🤣 0o0 that was my thought too

i am ‘gently, gently’ but this year pruned two trees right back as i was afraid of not being able to manage them in future

the relief at seeing new growth has been palpable though 😅

having a set ‘his area’ to do what he likes would probably help reduce stress, raised beds are good shout & also require building which ticks the ‘using power tools’ box

at least seedling growing/raised bed building is what is currently distracting me from any more ill-advised pruning in my own garden

This makes me so glad DH has no interest in the garden at all. He once brought me home a vine weevil in a box because he knows I like nature and thought he'd found a rare beetle.

I am the one that is on the gardening learning journal. My husband listens to me when I prattle on. But he has no interest in any plants. Which after reading this I am grateful for.

Can I recommend a hedge?
Also, constructing a pond will take him ages.

Honestly - ban him from anything other than mowing the lawn and painting the fence.

Or teach him to do one thing properly and let him take pride in that. I taught my ex to prune our wisteria back to the third bud.

It's the only way 🙂

Have you got room to let him have a shed? Many men would be happy in there, pootering about, sorting screws into jars, and unknotting bits of string. You could let him mow the lawn sometimes. Or plant bulbs under supervision.

Be wary about advising any shed building as a distraction. My DH is obsessed with building sheds. He took down the small completely adequate shed at the bottom of the garden and rebuilt is doubling its size and painting it a horrible dark brown colour. Then he built a bike shed in another part of the garden making it way more inconvenient to get the bikes out which were previously stored in the garage. Then he built a third shed. I have put him on a shed building ban and he knows I will lose the plot if I see anymore structures popping up in the garden. I suppose it is better than his father who concretes every inch of garden he can get away with. Very sad.

I’ve literally just had a conversation like this with DH. He said “we need to get out in the garden and get rid of all that dead stuff ready for the summer”😳

The “dead stuff” are beautiful clematis, wisteria, acers and other gorgeous climbers that will burst into life soon. I would seriously think about leaving him if he hacked at any of those.

My DH is the same. He’s pulled up loads of my plants over the years and he likes to do “pruning”, which to him means hacking huge chunks off everything.
I’ve told him many, many times which plants to leave alone. I show him which plants are weeds and which are wanted, over and over again. He says “sorry, I didn’t know” every time then does it again. I think he just has the un-greenest fingers ever and does genuinely forget. He does “garden jobs” when I’m out or without telling me what he’s going to do, so I don’t get the chance to stop him or guide him.

I’d love to ban him from doing anything but lawn mowing and helping me carry compost bags etc. I’ve asked him not to do pruning and weeding but he still does it. I’d love to know the secret to getting him to stop! The problem is he actually thinks his mutilated victims look good. Last year he gave all my shrubs a flat-top haircut and they look horrible. I was horrified but he said he thought that was how they were meant to be. Even though they have been there years and have never been cut into a hideous rectangle before.

One tip, @Imnoonesfool . Get yourself some real books on plant identification, don’t rely on apps. The apps are very unreliable and don’t help you to learn. Books will tell you what to look for to identify things, how to tell them apart from similar plants, and all sorts of useful info.

@curlywillow He sounds like the clueless gardener my late mother had. Absolutely useless. She told me he had “been to college” but whatever he studied it sure wasn’t anything to do with gardening.

You’ll have to lock the tools away.

my OH will cut the grass. But he has a tendency to march me around the garden like he’s the foreman, and asks or suggests to me that this or that needs to be moved/chopped or disposed of if it doesn’t look right to him. At which point I have the opportunity to explain to him why it is like it is.

He was weeding a pathway once and pulled out the only bit of Erigeron I had, I went a bit nuts and he planted it back. I think he knew then to leave well alone.