In celebration of being a terrible gardener

Mallory Murphy Viscardi has made mistake after mistake in the garden. She’s overwatered. She planted a fig tree right next to her home, and its roots snaked under the patio. She sowed superspreading mint directly in the ground, so “every spring, the mint just laughs and laughs as it comes back” while she wrestles to contain its voracious, unwanted creep. She placed her vegetable garden in her dog’s favorite bathroom spot.

“It made for a very long, very frustrating summer because halfway through the season, I realized he’s never not going to pee on my vegetables,” said Viscardi, a school counselor living in Murfreesboro, Tenn. “We couldn’t eat any of them because we don’t know what’s been peed on by the dog.”

She’s healthily unfazed by her botanical blunders – a lesson for newbie gardeners like me. Not long ago, I’d self-flagellate over my missteps, as if planting the wrong plant in the wrong place endangered our democracy or upset the cosmic balance.

Last summer, my first growing season at a community garden, I puzzled aloud about why my tomato plants yielded almost no fruit. The old-head gardener who maintained the plot beside mine diagnosed the problem within 30 seconds: I’d planted corn that grew so tall that my heliophilous tomatoes suffered, stunted, in their shadow. I face-palmed with embarrassment because, in the Carolinas where I live, tomatoes grow lushly with little intervention.

I’m used to doing many things very well. That has changed with everything I’ve planted and, more to the point, everything I’ve killed. At this point, I’ve murdered more plants than I’ve stewarded into full bloom. For me, gardening is the best self-help manual. It’s an antidote to my overachiever, overthinker tendencies, and I can be more philosophical about failure.

In fact, I know that failure is not one thing. There are the failures you can’t control, like when my sun-loving yarrow bit the dust after six weeks without rain; those that can be reversed with another season, patience and labor; others that can scar the earth for years to come; and some that can bear fruit (when I toss this summer’s mortally scorched plants in the compost heap). There are failures that come from not following best practices, like seeding a white clover lawn in a steamy Southern summer. And there’s my favorite kind of failure, the simplest of them all: the mistakes derived from pure ignorance and inexperience.

For about five years, Elly Truitt has planted dwarf trees, herbs and vegetables on her rooftop in Philadelphia. Her efforts yielded little more than a half cup of rhubarb (equal to one scant serving of compote), or a single salad’s worth of tomatoes, which she also thought would thrive in the air and sunlight atop her residence. The university history professor hadn’t added enough soil to the tomato containers, setting them up for malnutrition and a meager harvest. Paraphrasing Taylor Swift, she quipped, “I am the problem.”

Truitt calls herself a “loosely empirical” gardener. What she lacks in knowledge, she makes up for in enthusiasm. “The world has so many opportunities for feeling shame. I’m just not going to take (feeling bad about garden mistakes) on.”

She doesn’t need to have all the answers among her containers of green, living things. “I can see what works, and that feels like a kind of fairly low-stakes place to do that in my life,” she said. As an academic, she’s always researching – her first book took 10 years – and she said, “it’s good to free myself of the compulsion to over research.”

Truitt remembers and takes to heart the matter-of-fact insight of her landscape engineer sister who once flatly said, “Plants die. Just like people.” At first, Truitt “was killing things and it was my incompetence or circumstance, but it happens a lot less frequently. So I am learning.”

As Abra Lee, director of horticulture at Atlanta’s Oakwood Cemetery and Gardens, put it to me, “the garden will always defeat you.” Nature always gonna nature, so we must do as the plants do – and adapt.

Part of that adaptation means sussing out your gardening personality. Viscardi defines herself as a “chaos gardener” who balances a “poorly managed circus,” her household with three humans, three dogs, one cat, and a tortoise.

Her chaos gardening means she’s ambitious – she tends a shade garden, a patch of hops and medicinal plants, a gazebo sometimes blanketed in trumpet flowers and a “snacking garden” where her daughter can pluck a healthy afternoon treat anytime she wants. But it also means she’ll also forget where she planted loganberry until it shoots up later, and she perennially underestimates how much room specific plants need because she likes the “feral” look of an English country garden.

“I’m still super guilty of it, even though I know better. … I love my beds to look full and spilling over. I tend to plant stuff on top of each other. And now I’ve got two hydrangeas and a peony who are all fighting for the same 2 square feet,” she said.

Viscardi will never be one of those gardeners with perfectly straight rows of crops. It’s neither her personality nor her learning style (she says she has ADHD and bipolar disorder). She’s embraced that she has limited control over the plants – and sometimes herself. (“I’m the chaos in the garden,” she said.)

The gardener’s most important tool might be the ability to make a mistake, accept it and move on, said Marcus Cyprian, a former chef and horticulture program associate with the Gaston County cooperative extension department in North Carolina. When he started overseeing six school gardens, he had to step in and take over for a master gardener who left a school with a lush, fertile garden. During his temporary stewardship, the garden didn’t flourish. “I took over, and it tanked,” said Cyprian, who stuck with it for a while but then replaced the sickly plants with spry seedlings. And why not? Plants are generally renewable resources.

Though he’s been working growing things for close to a decade, Cyprian still often thinks of himself as a bad gardener. Sometimes, he doesn’t prep the soil well or give his vegetables the best chance at flourishing. Even now, he’s just razed his garden with a lawn mower because, mysteriously, nothing would germinate.

“Do you fold up and quit or do you figure out why you failed in the first place? And continue what you’re doing, but in a different way that will put you on a track to be more successful?” In his gardening vocabulary, success isn’t the perfect opposite of failure. “Resilience” is probably a better antonym. He’s ripped out his struggling corn this year and replanted a new crop.

Lee of Oakland Cemetery told me that she almost flunked out of her undergraduate horticulture program at Auburn University, later becoming the youngest person to oversee the landscaping at Atlanta’s busy Hartsfield International Airport. While there, she once forgot to order thousands of tulip bulbs for spring. She didn’t realize her error until February, when those bulbs should have already overwintered for months in the dirt. A veteran staffer told her to make the order and shared a hack: planting the bulbs close to the surface, so they’d get a fast-tracked shock of the cold they needed to emerge. “I didn’t know that,” Lee said. Failure can be disappointment, but it can also be data. “Failure in the garden makes you seek out other options,” Lee said.

The more I talk to other growers, I find calm in the fact that the garden is a space of constant reinvention – of both the landscape and the self. The seasons are built-in opportunities for trying again. And when you realize that plant you put in full sun really wants some shade, you can dig it up, replace it or move it, or toss it. There’s something both soothing and vexing to me about how human intervention can do so much and so little. Failure is frequent, inevitable and natural, all of which somehow makes it easier for this recovering perfectionist to take.