Biggest Gardening Disaster

[Trueloveneverdies]

I’ve always wanted a wedding cake tree. The year before last I found the perfect one. Beautifully spaced even branches and a lovely size. I bought a stupidly expensive huge terracotta pot to plant it in and was absolutely chuffed with it. I went on holiday for a week and my Mum watered it to death.

Every time I look at the pot I see the ghost of the wedding cake tree! Does anyone else have any gardening disasters?

I learned the hard way not to accept 'free topsoil' from anyone you don't know well.

Turns out it was 50% soil, 50% hairy bittercress seed. Years later I still spend hours pulling up the bastard stuff. Apparently you can make pesto with it. Big deal.

I also learnt the hard way that when people turn up to plant swaps with lots of the same thing, saying “some people say this is a weed, but it’s so pretty and I love it”, it is indeed an invasive nuisance and should be avoided.

<<looks ruefully at yellow archangel and three-cornered leek>>

Not strictly a disaster but…

Just before we moved house I bought a wedding cake tree from the ‘almost dead’ section in our local nursery. Dutifully planted in our front garden & watch it flourish! Breathtakingly beautiful. Moved house the following year. The irony is we only moved 6 doors down so I need to walk/drive ast the beauty on a daily basis. 😭

It’s flowers for me. For years I’ve diligently raised seedlings/bought plants and planted them out, with visions of armfuls of flowers and filling one vase after another. I generally average four or five posies over the whole summer.

Perennials, biennials, hardy/half-hardy, tubers - either there isn’t enough sun and they fade and wither, or get munched by slugs. Even roses are pathetic. Bulbs seem to work but I want ALL of the flowers!

I think I’m just a rubbish gardener in denial that there’s barely any sun at the back of my house 😢

I have a huge, beautiful garden, but we made a big mistake about 15 years ago by buying a dog who was a professional grave digger. He spent hour after hour digging massive grave size holes around every wall. If I put in a plant, even a decent sized tree he would dig it straight out. It was his life’s work to dig us all graves. When he finally died we had to bring in a ton of soil to fill in his chasms.

Long established bed on the patio; had a lovely little tree in it which cast shade in the summer. Underplanted it with shade loving plants. It was beautiful in the summer.

The tree has died. I now have a bunch of shade lovers being scorched by full south facing sun.

We had a gorgeous white hydrangea at the end of our garden when we moved in, I loved it. We decided to remodel the garden and the hydrangea had to be dug up, and obviously didn't survive being relocated 😥

...the worst of it is that we then changed our mind about the garden layout and it could have stayed put after all 😭

In a fit of enthusiasm 20 years ago I ripped out all the climbing hydrangea on my wall. I don't know what on earth I was thinking. Since then, I have tried so many times to replace it, and each new plant has died within weeks.

In lockdown I had a fit of enthusiasm and planted about 150 crocus bulbs in the front lawn. Every year more come up. We had 2 the first year. I think we had 8 this year.

However I did plant loads more last autumn and they came up beautifully.

Not a disaster in that way, but when we came here I planted a lovely pink climbing rose. However it's like a triffid. We trim it back regularly, but if ever we miss a year it takes over the garden. My dad's comment last year was it would be considered amazing in the garden of a stately home. Then it pulled the trellis off the wall as we watched.

It is fantastic for wildlife. We've had bird nests, bumblebee swarms, always lots of bees/butterflies/ladybirds etc and we always get sawfly caterpillars which are rather cute but strip the leaves back/

Fuck. I am in constant battle with it and knowing she willingly introduced it in ignorance makes me feel a bit sick!

I’ve just committed mine. Have the most stunning clematis armandii near my front door. It’s my fav plant in the garden. However, it has pulled the trellis off the wall and is completely overgrown, so I decided yesterday to renovate prune it so I could train it properly. It was so congested that when I was pruning I accidentally cut it back to a stump and now I have to wait and see if I killed the nicest thing in my garden!

neglected garden in new house for decade as had little children. When finally got into gardening discovered I had running bamboo and ground elder and they were rampant and I am never going to completely eliminate them ..

Oh and chickens. Big big mistake

Old house previously inhabited by feckless gardeners, in an area where the winters are harsh and the growing season is intense, before the hot summer arrives.. we battle with a procession of invasive weeds and always missing the planting window while waiting for spring to arrive.

Bamboo breaks my heart, as do brambles, ivy, and ground elder.

I love borage and have a beautiful slope of borage, lupins and californian poppies... but I spend a lot of time picking out bindweed (and an assortment of other feckers), lemon balm and mint (my own fecklessness) and thistles which grow insanely well in my garden.

I nurture a number of self seeding things including violets and wild strawberries but competition for those spaces is high and if I get the timing wrong, the other things win.

I sow seeds every year.. and occasionally have short lived wins... but more often than not, have nothing to show for my efforts and I have lost count of the number of things I have bought to plant in my garden that have died... fruit trees, hydrangea, herbs... and so many attempts to reseed patches of 'lawn'...