Garden disaaaaaaaaster! I've got no right to take my place with the human race

[Beachtastic]

A nod to Morrissey for the thread title...

I've planted a brand new garden from scratch (after living abroad in a place with no garden) and was so overexcited about this that I went mad for ordering plants online, with mixed results.

Then the raised beds took ages to sort out (for various complicated reasons), so a lot of things have been sitting around all spring/summer in pots waiting to go in the soil. Some have died, others are struggling, and some were never right in the first place and I suspect will end up on the compost heap.

When half the garden was finally ready for planting, I had completely forgotten my original plans for it (because many plants were no longer viable), so shoved things in hoping for the best, based on preferred sun exposure/soil type etc.

I've overplanted, mixed things up that don't go together, etc. I feel such a wretched failure! Come autumn/winter I'll move things around a bit, but in the meantime some plants have grown to twice the size I expected and are blocking others that haven't done so well.

The lovely garden I had in mind is currently just a source of stress and guilt about waste/expense/lack of imagination/poor judgement. I suppose it will evolve over time, but am really struggling with beating myself up and feeling like the world's worst gardener.

Has anyone else had this experience and does it get better over time?

I’ve no advice but I think the best gardens are those that evolve gradually and gardening is often trial and error. I’ve certainly been there and planted things that were wrong for the soil etc. I’m slowly getting there many years later and treating it as a learning experience.

I also clocked the Morrissey/ Smiths reference 😆 new ear worm for me!

Do you have a photo?

That's what gardening is, trial and error and seeing what does well in certain places. If you've over planted then just cut it back but tbh over planing prevents weeds so not a bad thing. You can shift stuff around easily once everything's finished flowering. Don't be hard on yourself.

This happened to me. I was so excited about finally having my own garden after a rental that I bought loads of plants before finding out what the soil and drainage were like. The garden turned out to be waterlogged in many areas. It’s also north-facing, to complicate matters. But I learned from the (many!) fatalities and seven years later the garden looks lovely. My roses have been the great survivors! I’m still learning more each year.

😬😬😬

It's a bit like opening an untidy knickers drawer... 😖

This is from left to right along the one planted raised bed. At this time of day there's a mix of light and shade, but they all get a reasonable amount of sun. At the back are clematis, honeysuckle, roses, jasmine, passiflora (!!!! - I might find another home for that - and not in this garden!)... even a bloody GRAPEVINE ffs 🤡 what was I thinking??!?!?!?

In the middle are all kinds of things from shrubs (e.g. sambucus nigra! plus some kind of flowering cherry that the label blew off in high winds!!!!) to (clearly struggling!) roses, and a lovely cosmos THAT HAS GONE MAD, and dark salvia that hasn't really flowered much but takes up a lot of room, and DAHLIAS that can't seem to work out what's going on (don't blame them!), hydrangeas, and a pretty lighter blue salvia that is pretty and tidy but somehow wasn't what I had in mind as I think I originally thought catmint would go around the roses (or course, the catmint is stuffed in there somewhere).

Some of these are supposed to end up becoming HUGE one day. I've been pretending they won't really (and maybe they never will, given the chaotic conditions). And I love the verbena, but have found out it spreads like wildfire...

Thank you all for the encouragement, but I feel like that horrible Sid in Toy Story whos created all these suffering mutants.

I think it looks great, 😃 but admittedly I am not at all green fingered. 🤣

Well it’s quite cheerful!
It would be helpful to also see the whole border from a distance but based on those images personally I would leave all the climbers where they are, yes they are too close but see which ones you love and are enjoying the space and prune out/move the rest.

A top tip would be to plant in uneven groups of 3/5/7/9’s etc with only accent plants as individuals.

Re the Cherry, that’s going to get pretty big and shade your sunny border so possibly isn’t suitable.

The Sambucus niger is also going to get huge but don’t forget you can prune it to the ground each year for fresh new foliage plus its bronzy leaves are a perfect backdrop for pink/peach roses which would as you say be gorgeous underplanted with catmint.

So for example in a 5-6m border with perhaps more depth than yours
2 climbers Clematis vitacella purpurea plena elegans is a favourite. Plus your Honeysuckle.

1 Sambucus at the rear
3 shrub Roses in front
9+ Catmint underplanting the roses (Nepeter Walkers Low is gorgeous)
With perhaps 25 Allium christophii bulbs threaded through.

Choose a colour scheme, consider your evergreens/winter interest and simplify, simplify, simplify.

There are planting maps - I saw a company does this with a large sheet of paper with cut out holes - I’ll see if i can find it

It takes years to get the garden to look good

It's lovely, proper cottage garden 😊

Take a deep breath and leave things to grow.

See what does well and what doesn't, see what looks good together, then remove the plants that aren't thriving, lift and divide your favourites (things always look better planted en mass) and stick what you decide against on your local Facebook group for free, and make some gardening contacts in the process.

Sambucus nigra can have the canopy lifted once established creating more space.

Thank you so much for the advice (and others for the charitable comments)!

Yes, I think when I was planting things too closely, I kept telling myself it would all be fine if I prune prune prune and feed feed feed (what competition for nutrients? not in my world...!), but I know something's got to give.

At some point I'm going to have to just dispose of things that aren't working. Maybe they will dispose of themselves before I have to bite that bullet!

Could I move things around in Sept/Oct, or is that too soon? It's quite warm here (SW).

Oh, don't talk to me about colour schemes 😖 😆 I had a lovely colour scheme in mind months ago, and it all went flying out the window 😬

That's it! That's what I had in mind for the sambucus.

Maybe all is not lost.

I think it’s a really good start and lots of lovely plants. I’m a professional gardener and I’ve seen many borders worse than this. I agree re moving the cherry to a bigger space. Also agree too many big climbers, but you can remove some later on. Let it all grow a year and see what happens. It’s guaranteed some plants will die, some will thrive, slugs will eat some - brunnera - some will self seed till you love or loathe them - verbena. Each spring move, divide, replace. Above all think of it as a creative process and enjoy it.

That means a lot, thank you!

I'm really cacking it now though because I bought not one, not two, but THREE flowering cherries - they were on the racks outside Tesco and I couldn't resist them when they were in flower. Again, I kidded myself I could prune them into tiny things no bigger than my little finger. I know Nature doesn't work that way and I hate myself!

According to Wiki, 'Kojo-no-Mai' is a cultivar suitable for the very small garden, as with judicious pruning it can be kept to a maximum size of 1.5–2 m (5–7 ft).

Well, we'll have to see about that... One of the many things I told myself was "suitable for a very small garden" was a Cornus kousa, which I later learned can grow up to 8 metres!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I gave it to a friend to plant in their field 😬

It looks really lovely!

I have been listing after ecinachea for years and bought several last weekend. One is pretty much dead now and I wondered why but then I spotted my cat watering it yesterday. Poor plant - it’s been having acidic piddle thrown at it several times a day. Cat seems obsessed with it. I need to just hope a good water will dilute it and it comes back as it was a beautiful colour!

If you want to restrict the growth of the cherry trees, dig them up and sink a big pot each into the ground, then plant it in the sunken pot. With restricted roots they won’t grow so big.
the only time you really shouldn’t move stuff is when it’s in flower, and that’s mostly because you’ll lose the flowers.
if you make ready the place you want to move a plant before digging it up you’ll reduce the stress on the plant as it won’t spend much time out of the soil.

Agree with you - I’d be very happy if my garden disasters looked this pretty 😁

I have a huge white cosmos this year, nearly a metre across - bought the small plants from the garden centre, I already had yellow cosmos I’d grown myself but they were a third the size but was told they are a difffetent variety. Bought the white to fill gaps and they took over.

my garden is looking sad as all the geraniums are going over - I should probably have cut them back weeks ago.
I wanted to say Dd has a passion flower which has spread over the flowerbeds - so take care with that. Hers throws shoots up constantly.

my verbana has not spread if its any consolation.

my Echinacea never grew, so i have another one, in a pot.
i plant verbana and then lose them
i plant lots of things which get strangled by weeds.
your garden looks really good op

I’m not a gardener but gardens take time to get established, it’s a bit trial and error unless you’re savvy. It doesn’t look bad though, just a shame about the waste!

Ten years ago we moved from a tiny city terrace to a bungalow with a huge overgrown garden. We've wasted a fortune but OMG learnt so much and how have a garden we could prob show. We still kill things waste thing plant things in the wrong place. At the beginning of this year my husband pulled up all the marigold seedlings I'd just planted out thinking they were weeds! Gardening is a mix of warfare and small triumphs enjoy the journey.

Love the warfare and small triumphs, so true. It's not a hobby where you use your materials to create your vision, it's more like crowd control where the materials have a vision of their own and it's your job to keep them in check and persuade them all to work together. Sometimes it's like being Dawn French in the Vicar of Dibley without having scriptwriters to magically pull it all together in the end.

If looks very pretty in your pics and I really think this is the only way to garden. Around 7 years ago, we moved to our current home and I started creating my second garden. As I had already learned so much, I thought I had it all worked out - but I did exactly the same as you. It’s has started to come together since I gave myself permission to rip things out and move them around (I try give each bed an overhaul over winter, while cutting back and adding bulbs). I tell myself I’m making my wasted money back by propagating the plants which thrive and that I really love (mainly by divisions). I put most of my reject plants in my front garden, which obviously ends up looking better than the back which I’ve meticulously planned. Gardening is a grand art/science experiment, you can never predict the results exactly and must embrace the chaos!