Farewell, perfection! So long, control!
On letting go of the perfect garden — a guest post from Casey Lister
(This voiceover is an audio version of the newsletter below. As always, it’s unedited, and today is read by the author of this newsletter - the lovely Casey Lister. If you like/need to listen to these posts I hope you enjoy it!)
Hello mates, Brooke here.
Before I get into this letter — a guest post about the joys and discoveries of letting go of perfection, written by the wonderful Casey Lister of lofi life — I just wanted to say a quick and heartfelt thank you all for your beautiful comments on my last post. I’m so grateful for this wonderful little corner of the internet and in particular you, the people who inhabit it and make it so special.
Your comments and emails have meant a lot to me over the past couple of days, and I will be back to reply to them. Thank you for being so kind, and thank you for being here.
💚💚
As I mentioned, this week’s letter from Casey resonated deeply with me when I first read it and today, as I continue to practise what it means to let go, it couldn’t resonate more.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve wrestled with perfectionism my entire life. Sometimes I think I’ve got a decent handle on it, and other times I feel completely immobilised by it — unable to move forward but afraid to go back.
For instance, I’ve been trying to get my garden in order for summer, but found myself constantly frustrated by disruptions and snail attacks and strong winds that knock my seedlings flat. Casey’s words of wisdom have been a gentle nudge to keep practicing the art of letting go.
Letting go of perfectionism, expectations and, to a large extent, my desire to control things that are often out of my control.
As we head into the final few weeks of the year, I feel like it’s a beautiful reminder for all of us.
For those of you who don’t know Casey, she is an author, gardener, garlic farmer and all-round, green-thumbed legend. You can learn more about her here:
- - Casey’s Substack
Seasoned - her brilliant cookbook
And with that, it’s over to Casey. 💚
I have been trying, for four weeks now, to write this.
And it’s just so terribly ironic. I want to talk to you about letting go of perfectionism. About abandoning self-criticism, loosening up, unclenching. About bringing a little more ease into our lives, taking things less seriously. Relaxing enough to live – just a little.
But it appears I can’t manage to practice what I preach. I am so bad, in fact, at practicing what I preach that I can’t even smash out the words of the sermon. For four weeks I’ve been at this now, and for four weeks I’ve been scrapping each draft and starting over.
The fact is, in many parts of my life, I am not very good at letting go. In a lot of respects, I’m more of a hanger-on-er. I hang on to worries, I clutch onto stress. I am quite highly strung and a tad neurotic. The people I love call me ‘intense’ and ‘passionate’, but I think they’re just trying to be kind. I am a bad flier; I see sharks where there are just shadows on the ocean floor; I check the stove every time I leave the house and multiple times before bed (although, having found the gas on at several of these occasions I’ve now started to think maybe it’s one of my more sensible neurotic tendencies).
And yet. For reasons I don’t fully understand, there is one area of my life that is blissfully unburdened by these ruminations: the garden.
In the garden, I am a stone-cold chiller. When it comes to plants, I am full of an uncharacteristically reckless, unbridled confidence. I fling seeds around en masse without knowing what I’ll do if they all germinate. I plant trees at one end of the yard, change my mind a fortnight later, dig them up and stick them somewhere else. I don’t really make plans, I don’t worry about bugs, diseases or weeds and I don’t beat myself because my garden’s not as ‘good’ as someone else’s. I kill plants all the time and I still, somehow, go merrily on my way.
I don’t know why my temperament is so fundamentally different in the garden compared to every other aspect of my life, but I’m certainly not complaining and I’m sure as hell not going to question it. Instead, I’m going to share with you five tips for letting go, from this one part of my life where I think I am – maybe – just a little bit wise.
Letting go in the garden.
You can be uptight about your work. You can stress out about finances and the state of the world. You can worry about your kids, your health, and the Joneses next door. Step outside, for a moment, and let all that go. The garden is no place for those serious, adult contemplations. The ants and the slaters and slugs don’t give a damn about your bank balance, the fight you had with your neighbour or the last deadline you missed.
Our gardens provide us with the most wonderful opportunity to free ourselves from all these grown-up, serious worries, because the plants and animals plainly don’t give a shit about any of it. They are beautifully unconcerned about the minutia of our lives, and, in their total disregard for our existence, they offer us the opportunity to forget about it all – briefly – too.
Which is why it is such a tragic state of affairs when we find ourselves getting uptight about our gardens, as well. When we’re fooled into stressing out over aphids, or powdery mildew, usually by brands, companies or ‘influencers’ who are angling to sell us a new product as the solution to our gardening ‘problems’ (that aren’t actually problems at all).
As with so many things, the slow creep of consumerist culture has invaded our gardens like couch grass, roots slithering down deeper and deeper, so that the narrative around growing things has become as negative, perfectionistic and product-based as it is in all other areas of our lives. According to the internet, there is a ‘right way’ to garden, and it involves a lot of convoluted and expensive procedures and heaven forbid you get it wrong. Stuff that.
Here's how to let go of all that nonsense. Here’s how to drop the perfectionism, abandon the self-criticism, relinquish control and actually enjoy your garden.
Which is, after all, the only thing that truly matters.
1. Let the pests in
The first things to let go of are your worries about ‘pests’. You do not need to stress about aphids, or ants, or crickets, slugs, snails, caterpillars, scale, thrips or any other many-legged, winged bugs. I promise.
I’m not surprised if you find this hard to believe or accept, because the internet is awash with ridiculous and unnecessary fearmongering about the various critters you might find in your patch.
It is such a shame. Instead of encouraging gardeners to feel curiosity and excitement upon finding a new visitor to their garden, the overwhelming message online is that we should FREAK OUT and head straight to our nearest garden centre for some kind of chemical that will help control/eradicate/solve our problem.
In almost every instance, ‘pests’ aren’t your problem.
When we think we see plagues of ‘pests’ in our garden, what we’re really seeing, 99 times out of 100, is an imbalance in the ratio of predatory insects to prey. It’s this imbalance that creates the issues, not any particular bug. And the terribly frustrating thing is that our knee-jerk tendency to come in guns blazing and ‘save’ our plants by killing every last bug ultimately makes the problem much worse because it perpetuates this imbalance.
We need ‘pests’ in our gardens if we want to have healthy gardens. You know why? Because they are the key to attracting predatory insects, amphibians, reptiles, spiders and birds. ‘Pests’ form the foundation of a healthy garden ecosystem; without them, the whole structure is weakened.
And the ridiculous thing is, we all claim to want gardens filled with birds, wildlife and beneficial bugs, but we determinedly refuse to do the one thing that will attract them to our patches: leave the pests alone!!
If you want ladybirds, embrace the aphids they feed on.
If you want birds, embrace the slaters, crickets and caterpillars that they eat.
If you want frogs, accept the snails and slugs that frequent your garden.
Without ‘pests’, these animals will see your garden as nothing but a barren wasteland. It will look empty and unattractive to them. And this will make it weaker.
Think about it this way: you are never going to eradicate all the aphids off the face of the planet. You might get rid of them in your garden for a month or two, but they’re still in your neighbours’ gardens, waiting to waft in on the wind. When you try to kill them all, the only thing you’re ultimately doing is making your garden less appealing to the animals that predate them. Kill your aphids and the ladybirds, lacewings, hoverflies and parasitic wasps will pack up shop, too. Then, when you inevitably get another influx of aphids, there will be nothing there to eat them; their populations will explode and that is when they’ll truly damage your garden.
If you want a healthy, resilient and life-filled garden, let go of your fears about pests. Ditch the bug sprays and poisons and meet every new critter with a welcoming acceptance. You might find it makes gardening a lot more enjoyable, too.
2. Let your weeds grow (mostly)
Next, let go of your weed worries. I’m not saying you should never weed your garden; I rip things out of mine from time to time. But if the uninvited plants in your garden are causing you stress or turning gardening into some mindless and monotonous chore, here’s a reframe that might help:
Weeds are useful. As long as they’re not terribly invasive, while they take up space in your garden, they are helping you. Weeds are tough, hardy and resilient. They thrive in crappy, neglected garden beds, they require no care; they grow well. While they’re growing, they provide cover for your soil, shielding it from the sun’s damaging rays. Their roots help to aerate the soil and direct water down into the earth, reducing runoff. Their flowers, when they come, tend to be pollen-rich and good for beneficial bugs.
Once you stop reflexively hating them, you might find that there is beauty in the blooms of pink-sorrel (oxalis) and the yellow petals of a dandelion. You might notice that the clover you keep ripping out is actually the same as (or closely related to) the red clover that is advertised and sold as a cover crop to improve your soil. Or that many weeds, like purslane and stinging nettles, can be used in your cooking.
I’m not saying you have to learn to love couch grass or the truly invasive weeds that, if left unchecked, will take over a whole backyard. I pull out couch grass when I see it, and I’ll remove uninvited plants if they’re starting to spread too quickly. But, in the battle between the plants you’ve intentionally planted and those that spring up of their own accord, it pays to relax your definitions a little. To avoid the black and white (and entirely arbitrary) distinctions between ‘plants’ and ‘weeds’ – two words that actually mean very little in any real, biological sense. If the plant isn’t bugging you, if it’s filling a patch of earth that would otherwise be empty, or if (heaven forbid!) you actually kind of like it, leave it be. And cut yourself some slack. Having a weed or two in your garden doesn’t make you a bad gardener. In fact, it might make you a better one.
3. Let your coriander bolt and your lettuces bloom
Let go of the pressure to pull out your plants the moment they’ve stopped being ‘useful’. We have such a narrow and prescriptive definition of utility for every plant we’re growing that we miss out on half of their charm and beauty. And, in fact, we miss out on a heap of their genuine usefulness too.
Have you ever paused to consider what it truly means when a plant ‘bolts’? I’m not sure where this idea of ‘bolting’ originated, but it’s done far more harm than good. A ‘bolting’ coriander, or lettuce, or mustard green, is simply a plant that has reached the point in its life cycle where it decides to flower and set seed. There is nothing inherently bad about bolting, but because we have this special word for it, and because companies like to market ‘slow-bolt’ coriander, and because garden gurus like to tell you to pull your plants out prematurely, we’ve grown to associate bolting with badness. Bolting parsley is beautiful!! Bolting mustard greens are tall, graceful, weird and gorgeous.
Did you know that coriander is in the same plant family as Queen Anne’s Lace? That we plant Queen Anne’s Lace for its frothy, ethereal flowers, but dutifully rip out our coriander just moments before it produces its own uncannily similar (and equally beautiful) blooms? It’s nonsensical! It’s a waste of so much untapped potential. And, once again, it’s the other lifeforms in our garden that suffer.
Coriander, lettuce, broccoli, radish, carrots and mizuna, like so many edible plants, produce flowers that are laden with pollen and fantastic for increasing the insect biodiversity in our gardens. All we have to do is let go of the pressure to jump in and rip out. Leave them in your garden and you will discover a hitherto unknown world of truly beautiful flowers, and a garden that thrums with life.
4. Let your plants die
There’s one other reason to let your plants complete a full life cycle in your garden. And in a certain conspiracy-theory-compartment of my brain, I wonder whether the concept of ‘bolting’ is just a clever ploy to stop gardeners from having this one specific revelation: if you let your plants bolt, flower and die, they’ll return the favour by supplying you with a lifetime of seeds, for free!
Better yet, you may find that these dead and dying plants add a new layer of beauty to your garden. According to Piet Oudolf, a man who plants his gardens like an artist painting on a canvas, “A plant is only worth growing if it looks good when it's dead”. Much as we miss out on our plants’ potential for flowers and seeds by removing them too soon, we may be missing out on the opportunity for unconventionally staggering, structural beauty in our gardens by ripping stuff out as soon as it starts to die.
Crisp, stiff stalks of dead fennel topped with dried blooms like bronze crowns, the structural, spherical heads of Breadseed poppies that have long since lost their petals, dry grasses that have gone from green to golden in the late summer heat – these plants have a rugged beauty that clever gardeners make the most of (dead plants also provide vital habitats for spiders, lizards, birds and countless other wildlife).
Use it as an excuse for laziness, say you’re leaving the plants so that their seeds can feed the birds – whatever rationalisation suits you best – allow yourself a little extra time to see what your plants do as the last vestiges of life fade from their leaves. And while you’re at it, cut yourself the same slack too. Time makes fools of us all, if there’s hidden beauty to be found in the passing of the years – whether in the garden or the gardener – it’s worth finding it.
5. Let your garden be
If you let go of one thing in your garden, let go of the idea that it needs to be anything at all. Whatever it is right now, let it be. And find a way to love it.
The reason I find our prescriptive gardening rules so frustrating is that they rob us of the joy of simply gardening for the sake of it.
There is no ultimate goal in a garden, because gardens have no end point, and they can never be finished. Countless beautiful gardens have withered into neglect; they have been sold and bought by people who rip them out and replace them with pools, or granny flats, or Astro turf. While they lasted, they were beautiful. But that’s not the point. The point of growing a garden is just that: growing it.
Happy quiet days of pottering. Morning cups of steaming tea. The excitement of spotting a new bug, and the pleasure of tasting a fresh tomato or watching a butterfly flit by on the breeze. In a world where so many of us are encumbered by perfectionistic tendencies, self-critical thoughts and pressure to be constantly doing, making, improving and striving, we all need a quiet place to feel free.
Silence the superfluous noise. Step outside, and let your garden bring you joy, however it’s growing, wherever it’s at, right now.
That, surely, is the only ‘right’ way to do it.
Brooke again. See what I mean? Such a beautiful prompt to let go a little. There’s so much to be gained.
You’re a gem Casey, thank you again for such a beautiful post.
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That’s it for the week, mates. I hope you have a chance to practice the art of letting go this weekend. I’ll be back with a letter on Sunday for all my paying subscribers, and back in everyone’s inbox next Thursday.
Until then, take the best care,
Brooke 💚💚
Love this! Thanks for this guest post, Brooke.
I've never been a gardener because of all those rules! Maybe I'd love it more if I followed Casey's advice.
Really loved reading this! Thanks Brooke & Casey for sharing your insights. When I’m in my garden I feel like I am looking into the mirror of life🌿