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When I was young, I never needed anyone. And making love was just for fun. And I believed I had to maintain a coherent colour palette in my garden.
Those days are gone.
Look, I’m not saying it’s not pretty when you tactically curate a garden bed filled exclusively with pastel pinks and mauves. I’m not saying that the dark burgundy leaves of a Giant Red Mustard plant don’t contrast nicely with the silvery blue of Old Man’s Salt Bush.
All I’m saying is that garden colour palettes - like companion planting, compost tea and crop rotation - are kiiiiiind of bullshit. Or if not bullshit, they are, at the very least, a serious waste of your time.
You know what the problem is? Everyone thinks that gardening is something you do when you’ve got plenty of discretionary time. Limitless leisure. It’s why people walking past our house have told me they thought a retired couple must live here. People assume you need copious amounts of time to grow a garden, so the only people who start gardens are those with copious amounts of time. Which leads, inevitably, to a vicious cycle where time-rich gardeners seeking endless ways to occupy themselves invent increasingly unnecessary and inefficient ‘rules’ about how it must be done.
To that, I say ‘pff’.
Also, I tried it. Once. Kind of. I got all excited about the sweeping waves of colour I was going to ‘paint’ throughout my garden. There were themes. There were warm zones and cool zones. There was, for me, an uncharacteristic amount of planning. And you know what? It looked exactly the same as it looks this year.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd994577f-1fcc-4301-974b-346790852459_4608x3456.jpeg)
Know how much planning I did this year? None! Or as close to none as humanly possible - I’ve spent all winter Chaos Gardening, remember? Colour palettes be damned I threw everything in everywhere and now spring is here and I am pleased to report it looks every bit as beautiful as it did when I tried to be tactical. And I have decided that this is GREAT NEWS because it is one more thing you don’t need to worry about or waste your time on.
Now, if you have endless hours up your sleeve and you like the idea of planning the colours that will fill your beds each season, by all means, do that. I’ve no doubt it will be glorious. But to everyone else: I want you to know that gardening can be as quick, efficient and rough and ready as you need it to be in order to actually do it. Because actually doing it is the only bit that matters. Also because perfectionism sucks and is the enemy of joy.
So, if colour palettes aren’t the be-all and end-all of an aesthetically pleasing garden, what is? What actually makes a garden beautiful? I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say there is one thing that really, truly matters. Not just in terms of aesthetics, but for the overall health of your garden. And not only is it something most people consistently overlook, it’s something many of them actively rail against.
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