Why You Should Create a Chaotic Garden
Here’s a secret: gardening isn’t about plants. Plants don’t need us to tinker or decide where to live; they handle it better on their own. Gardening is about our hopes and expectations: planning a summer’s tomato harvest without insect bites, or a sturdy hedge of sunflowers that squirrels won’t use as scaffolding. For inspiration, we look at Instagram accounts of gardeners holding incredibly large bouquets of snapdragons standing in a field of flowers, or the kitchen pot from the Meryl Streep movie where the garden was so perfect it turned out it was created with the help of an entire team of gardeners . gluing the vegetables into place. Instead of striving for impossible gardening standards, I say we embrace chaos in the garden as a way to reduce stress and bring back the joy of growing plants.
You can’t control the plants or the weather
The reality is that gardening can get messy. To implement an accurate plan, you will have to constantly weed, feed, prune and plant, all within the strict confines of the summer season. You can’t control the sun, snow or rain in any given year, and you can’t do anything about viruses or fungi. If the harvest fails, it can feel like a personal failure. While gardening has been proven to reduce stress, it can also cause stress if you are too strict with your plans, as many new gardeners are. Chaos gardening involves you just start sticking plants into empty spaces and see what happens.
Good to know about interplanting and invasive plants.
Before you give in to complete chaos, you might want to think about some rules. First, some plants coexist better than others. For example, fennel does not like the company of other plants. Brassicas prefer to stick together, just like nightshades. But in companion plantings they make excellent neighbors: cucumbers love to be with beans, and onions and tomatoes grow well together. Sweet alyssum and flowering dill benefit the vegetables around them. While it can be tedious to think too much about companion planting, it can be as simple as looking at the empty space where you’re going to plant, say, kale, and seeing what’s around it. If you have eggplants, plant cabbage in a different location.
You should also know if a particular plant, such as mint, foxgloves or berry stems, spreads easily because they can easily take over space. Invasive plants like bluebells may seem charming at first glance, but they are very, very difficult to control once they are established. While herbs like dill and parsley can be perennials, meaning they simply spread and come back year after year on their own, they don’t take up space or crowd out other plants the way mint does. You can use plant identification apps to know what you’re planting, what’s nearby, and whether it will spread.
If you keep throwing plants on the ground, some will take root.
What you plant will always be a mix of perennials and annuals, meaning some will come back year after year and some will likely die after a season. In my personal experience, if you just keep putting plants into an empty space, over time the space becomes more filled as the perennials get established, and you’ll find a few plants that should be annuals that become perennials anyway when you try them in different places. . That’s the point: plants are great at finding a suitable place for themselves.
Chaos in the garden makes plants less vulnerable
By spreading plants throughout the garden, you eliminate monocultures. This means crops will be much harder to destroy by a pest or virus because there is no one giant target to hit and the plants are spread out so problems can’t spread as easily. In fact, spreading plants is better for soil and plant health. A whole bed of peas is great because peas fix nitrogen, but they don’t benefit other plants, like the corn next door, which is desperate for nitrogen. But if they are transplanted, they can benefit each other.
Chaos in the garden gives the landscape a much more interesting texture of different colors, heights and patterns. There’s a new discovery or joy around every corner, and plants that aren’t doing well don’t have the same impact. If something dies, pull it out and plant something else, no matter what.
Options can make chaos more comfortable
If you still need some control, give the areas themes or relax the rules. The area in front of my house is intended exclusively for cutting flowers, but there is no specific order. Perennial echinacea combines with annual zinnias and bulbs of any height and texture. My flower wall along the edge of the plot has only one rule: planting is based on height, so the tallest plants are at the back. Asparagus and artichokes are combined with 16-foot sunflowers, free-growing foxgloves and tulips. In the vegetable garden, slow-blooming kale sits alongside Egyptian walking onions and shiso, resulting in a stunning combination of color and texture. When the cabbage is done, I pull it out and plant something else. Every empty space is simply an opportunity to grow something new. You can even designate some areas for chaos and some for more orderly planting if that’s important to you.
Ultimately, it’s important to remember that gardening, while addictive, should be relaxing. While formal gardens with clean lines and obvious themes are beautiful, they require entire teams to maintain them. If you can relax a little and embrace a little more chaos, you can find more joy in your garden.