A gardening columnist’s three garden resolutions for 2021

This New Year, I’m skipping the traditional triumvirate – get fit, lose weight, drink less – to focus on the garden. My resolutions are these:

Quit feeling guilty

All too often plants and plantings don’t turn out the way we’d hoped. They are too big, too small, wrong colour, wrong habitat, sick – and sometimes dead. And even if the individual plants are fine on their own, their incompatibility with their neighbours may be causing our visions of loveliness to fall flat.

This year I’m going to admit failure faster and move on.

I’ll triage unhealthy plants before committing to trying to save them. Is failure to thrive easily remedied, with a boost of Gogo Juice or Seasol and a bucket of water, or have I just tried to grow the wrong plant in the wrong place? I’ll make a hard-headed decision about treatment based on the importance of the plant to the garden – and the gardener. Not all plants deserve nursing.

And when the lovely vision fails to materialise I’ll experience no guilt as I toss the failing plant/plants into the compost and begin to dream a new, more realistic, scheme.

Likewise, I’ll compost the indoor plants that are no longer giving me joy. (And my plea to others: don’t even consider planting an indoor plant outside. All too many tiny Sydney yards are struggling under the now-massive imposition of a formerly pot-bound fiddle-leaf fig, monstera or firesticks.)

This year, I give myself permission to fail in the garden, change my mind, hate the thing I used to love and ditch what doesn’t make me happy.

Keep notes