Crap garden 'advice' you should 100% ignore (part 1)

When the 'experts' make your garden worse, not better

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The world is full of learned experts.

The world is also full of overconfident know-it-alls.

And, when it comes to our gardens, I often find the greatest challenge lies not in growing healthy plants, but in learning to recognise the know-it-alls masquerading as experts, and ignoring everything they tell you.

The longer I garden, the more I notice this. Not because I myself am becoming an expert (ha!) but because I am meeting more and more people who are growing absolutely phenomenal gardens and the (usually humble, often off-hand) advice they give me is nothing like the advice I see flung around on TV, podcasts and social media.

And it is starting to get my goat!!

Not least because it is the most boring garden content out there. Which would be fine if it actually worked, but most of the time it actually makes your garden worse, not better.

This advice tends to fall into one of two categories, either it is dull, dreary and overcomplicated, turning gardening into routinised, repetitive homework, or it is fear mongering, making mountains out of molehills, turning pansies into problems and generally ruining the whole vibe of the thing. And usually trying to convince us we need to buy something to fix the problem.

There’s nothing good about this advice. I used to listen to it and feel like an impostor, assuming that my lack of foliar sprays and insufficient pruning regimens must mean I was an inadequate gardener.

I now see the ridiculousness in this. But for years I missed it…

Gardening is a made up construct! We made it up! We just invented it because we had a little pause in between wars, ran out of wool for our knitting projects and wanted to one-up our neighbours.

I mean, growing things is a natural human activity - we’ve been doing THAT for millennia. But ‘gardening’? Creating pseodo-natural environments filled with assorted plants from every corner of the globe? That’s a totally made up hobby. Like watercolour painting, like quilting, like rock collecting. And the thing about made up hobbies is you can do them however the hell you like. And - usually - thats where the beauty, excitement, discovery and joy really lies.

So here are five pieces of garden advice I’ve heard recently that I really think we should all totally ignore. In my experience, not only do they strip the fun out of gardening, but they often backfire, leaving you with a less healthy, more high-maintenance and less successful garden in the long run.

Remember, though, I don’t know what the hell I’m on about either

Hard prune your roses

Winter is (apparently) coming, although I’m not sure if winter even exists anymore?? At any rate, if it ever arrives a whole lotta people are going to start going on about rose pruning. For a long time I followed their advice - prune your rose into an open vase shape to encourage airflow, cut it back to promote more spring flowers. The prevailing message seems to be the better gardener you are, the more you will hack it back to a stubby stump.

You see evidence of this pruning message everywhere through winter. I’m already seeing it now, in fact. Ancient old rose bushes, trying to spread their wings and, each year, chopped back like a bad haircut, stunted and sad.

Did you know many roses can grow as big as small trees??

I didn’t. Then, last spring, I had the pleasure of visiting the most beautiful rose garden I have ever laid eyes on. If you live in WA, I really, really suggest you give Mostly Roses a visit. It’s inland and about 2.5 hours south, and in spring it is an otherworldly, bloom-filled paradise. And it’s created by Seamus, a true legend of a man, whose encyclopaedic knowledge of rose varieties is a testament to the many years he has spent tending them. Also, he’s got an Irish accent and if there is a better way to spend a spring morning than walking through a hillside covered in blooming roses while a lovely, grey haired Irishman softly explains the difference between a tea rose and an Iranian hybrid I can’t think of it.

Here’s what Seamus told me about rose pruning:

The strict rules about rose pruning come from England. Wet, usually wintry, muddy England. Where fungal diseases are an actual problem and where opening up a rose to increase airflow might make an actual difference.

We live in Perth. A place as dry as your tongue with a bad hangover, and only getting drier. According to Seamus (and I gotta tell you, the man talks a lot of sense), traditional pruning methods are simply overkill in our climate.

Seamus doesn’t worry much about increased airflow. He lets his roses grow tall. That’s not to say he doesn’t prune them at all, but he is much gentler, more restrained. He’ll remove dead and diseased branches and will cut his roses back a little each winter, but he doesn’t chop them back nearly enough to impress the rose society of WA.

Instead of heavy pruning each winter, he does a lighter prune, then takes the longer branches and pulls them down until they are almost horizontal, tying them to stakes so that bush fans outwards like a fountain. The new shoots these long branches produce (the laterals) then grow upwards. This gives his roses so much more presence in his garden, and I love it.

He doesn’t use the same approach for climbing roses, and there is so much more nuance to his pruning methods than I - with my limited knowledge - could hope to convey to you (you’ll have to visit Mostly Roses and ask him yourself). But, since visiting his garden, I have taken a much more relaxed approach to pruning my roses. And you know what? The sky didn’t fall in. The roses didn’t perish. In fact, I think they may have even bloomed more beautifully than before.

Roses are a funny plant. Until fairly recently they always seemed so tough, beautiful and hardy. Maybe that’s why we tended to butcher them so recklessly. But lately (especially with the arrival of chilli thrips), they feel more temperamental, a little less reliable. If you are struggling to keep your roses happy, you might like Seamus’ other piece of advice - plant English-Iranian hybrid roses. These roses - typically with names that include “eyes” (Eye of the Tiger, Eyes for You and For Your Eyes Only are some of the ones I have grown and loved) are less susceptible to thrips and black spot, and may be a tad less frustrating to grow.

For Your Eyes Only roses blooming in Seamus garden

Check ‘em out and give them a go in your garden! And this winter, don’t worry about pruning them ‘perfectly’; there’s no such thing.

Until next time…

Well, as usual it turns out I have waffled on more than I expected and, to avoid exhausting you with verbiage, I think I will make this a multi-part series. Like when you used to have to wait a whole week for the next episode of Seinfeld, back in the halcyon days when it actually rained a little bit and shothole borers kept to themselves in Southeast asia and everything was awash with a rose-tinted shoulder-padded optimistic glimmer.

We’ll get back there, somehow. With gardens full of giant, sprawling roses and our ears still ringing with all the advice we never follow.

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