The most difficult plants I've never grown
Because sometimes *not* trying really IS the best thing you can do
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Some plants are just bastards.
It’s as simple as that. And, like toxic bosses, irritating exes and neighbours who send you belligerent notes taped to the underside of frisbees flung over your fence, life is really a whole lot better without them.
Now, to be fair, no plant is a bastard everywhere. The thing about plants is that they really should be easy to grow. Plants have evolved to thrive in different conditions all over the planet, from rainforests to deserts. When a plant fails to thrive in your garden, usually there is nothing wrong with the plant per se; the problem is with the environment you’ve put it in (too sunny, too cold, too dry, too wet, too windy, too muddy, too sandy… you get the idea). When you don’t match the environment to your plant, you’re asking the plant to ignore the millions of years of evolution that have made it perfectly suited to one specific environment (that unfortunately is not your garden), to rise above its genetic programming and just thrive anyway.
Needless to say, that doesn’t work. Like a fish out of water, a plant planted in the wrong spot lives on borrowed time. If you want to grow a beautiful garden easily (and you absolutely can), the key is to grow plants that actually like the environment you’re putting them in. The good news is, when you take your environment into account and pick your plants accordingly, gardening becomes much more successful and enjoyable.
When you ignore your environment and plant whatever, wherever, well, you’ll find some plants are just bastards.
I’ve learnt this the hard way a few times, and you know what, I don’t even blame myself for half of it. The dirty secret you need to know is: garden centres stock plenty of bastards. Prissy little plants raised in hot houses, fed on water laced with NPK or cocaine or viagra or something that makes them appear to be in the prime of their life when you take them home, only to watch, despairingly, as they wilt and die a week later. (Don’t worry if this has happened to you, by the way. It happens to everyone. It’s a rite of passage). These plants should be sold with a caveat that they just don’t like our country very much, and they probably won’t like your garden very much either, but that wouldn’t be very good for sales, so it doesn’t happen.
Anyway, to spare you from the frustrations I’ve already encountered in my garden, I thought I’d share with you my consolidated list of plant bastards. More skilled gardeners than I (or people with different growing conditions) may have had great success with these plants. I haven’t. And IMHO, if your soil is dry, sandy and alkaline too, these plants aren’t worth your time. Save yourself the heartache, buy an echium, a cistus, an artichoke or any of the other hundreds, nay, thousands of plants that thrive in our climate instead.
Plant bastards I have known and loathed
Azaleas, camellias & gardenias
Don’t let the dark, glossy leaves, abundant, lurid blooms or intoxicating fragrance seduce you. These plant bastards love acidic, moisture retentive soil with plenty of organic matter. Where I’m gardening, the sun burns their leaves, the alkaline soil stresses them out and (because they’re already stressed) sap-sucking bugs like scale flock to them and finish them off. Their leaves turn yellow and fall off painfully slowly. I’ve watched several azaleas and gardenias turn to sticks in my garden over about 6 months and it was decidedly not fun. Never again.
Hydrangeas
Want more moisture and less sunburn than I’ll ever be able to give them. I’ve seen other local gardeners grow them successfully, and who knows, maybe there’s a microclimate in my garden where they might succeed. But I’ve killed so many so far that I don’t have the heart to try again. Also I can never bloody well propagate them and it infuriates me.
Maple trees
I splurged on two of these acid-loving bastards. Both were irresponsibly expensive and now both are dead.
Peonies
Need a frost to flower, so you think “ok fine, I’ll just lift them each year and put them in the fridge to simulate a frost”, but then they also don’t like being lifted, so what are you going to do? Stick them in a huge pot and put the pot in the fridge every year? All through winter? Well, I did in fact decide that I was going to do exactly this and prove everyone wrong with glorious flowering peonies in my garden every spring. What actually happened is I planted the bulb, it flowered once (because someone else had already put it in the fridge before selling it to me), and then I immediately lost interest because I like to keep things like cheese in my fridge, not large terracotta pots filled with soil and needy plant bastards.
Carnivorous plants
There are two kinds of gardeners in this world. The kind that keep carnivorous plants alive, watering them with reverse osmosis water (they don’t like the ‘impurities’ in our tap waters lah dee dah), giving them just the right amount of sunshine and humidity, in special pots with reservoirs that keep their roots nice and wet throughout our hot dry summers… And then there’s the ones like me. Who provide none of the things these plants need to survive… so they don’t. Maybe I’m the bastard?
Don’t let the bastards get you down
There are no doubt more plants to be added to this list, but these are the standouts for me that - if you’re gardening in a hot, dry climate with sandy, alkaline soil - are simply not worth the price of admission.
Thing is, no matter where you live in the world, everyone will have their own personal list of plant bastards. The secret to growing a successful garden is to develop a great Plant Bastard Radar so that you can spot right away if you are barking up the wrong proverbial tree, and avoid growing them in the first place. Ditch the plants that don’t make life easy and embrace simply not trying so hard. Fill your garden with the strong plants, the resilient plants; the plants that have evolved not to rail against our soil and seasons, but to revel in them.
Poppies, olive trees, salvias, passionfruit marigolds, moonflowers, citrus trees, mulberries, pelargoniums, papayas, daffodils, nasturtiums… there are so many plants that will thrive in your garden if you live in a sunny, Mediterranean place like Perth. If you’d like to know about more of the plants that will flourish in a place like this, here are a few posts you might like:
Until next time, stay grubby!
Xx Casey
Thank you for reading! See you next time for more Lo fi life!
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Your writing is marvelous ! Thank you for writing on substack.
LOVE THIS!!!! However, some of those bastards I LOVE SADLY!!!!!!!