There’s a misconception about gardens that I run into more than any other. It’s one that costs people much more than they probably realise. And it all boils down to a simple misunderstanding.
You see most homeowners think creating a garden ends when the landscaping is finished. The crew packs up, the last plants go in, and that’s it. Job done.
It isn’t an end. It’s actually a new beginning. Because it’s the moment a different kind of creation starts.
Designing, creating and building the garden was one thing. But the next stage comes after.
Some people call the next stage of their garden – maintenance. I understand why. It’s the word everyone reaches for. And for the material parts of a garden – the paving, the lighting, the retaining walls – it’s not a bad word at all. You do need to maintain these things.
But maintenance only keeps something in the condition it is already in. It stops that thing from deteriorating.
You maintain a car. You maintain a fence. You maintain a swimming pool. These are all things that don’t grow, so keeping them exactly the same is the job required.
But a garden isn’t just those things. A garden is also alive.
Would you say a parent maintains a child?
Nobody would say that. And everybody knows why. A child isn’t someone who is kept in the same condition year after year. A child is nurtured. And nurturing is a completely different act from maintaining.
Nurturing assumes growth. It is an act that responds to the different stages of growth. And it shapes what that growth becomes. You don’t nurture a child so they stay exactly as they were at three years old. You nurture them into becoming whoever they’re meant to become.
Plants are the same. They’re not finished things that just sit in the place they were planted, waiting to be kept as they are. They grow every single day, whether anyone’s paying attention to them or not. If you treat that growth like a maintenance task, something you tick off as a done, then you’re trying to manage a garden that’s quietly moving on without you. But if you treat it as a nurturing task, then you are shaping your garden’s future.
That’s the main difference. Nurturing a garden isn’t a lesser job than it was to create it. It’s simply that original intention of creation, being continued into the future. Every time you prune, every time you feed, every decision you make about what to let grow and what to hold back is another small act of continuing your original intention to create a garden that you made months or years after your first originated this project. The garden your landscaper handed over to you was just the start. What it becomes is still being decided, every season, by whoever is looking after it. And that is usually you!
Why the best gardens are never actually finished
I’ve spent 35 years designing and building gardens across Melbourne. The ones I’m most proud of, and the ones that make other people go quiet when they first see them, are never the ones that were simply built well and then left alone.
They are always the ones that somebody kept creating. The one where the client noticed a hedge was wanting to grow into a different shape, and let it take three years to become that shape. The one where the client ended up moving a plant three times before they found the spot it actually wanted. That’s not just someone maintaining a garden. That’s you applying the same creative instinct you had when you first chose the original garden design. A creative urge that is still switched on, still paying attention, years after the landscapers left.
Whether that ongoing creation of your garden happens at your own hands or through a professional who keeps coming back doesn’t matter much. What matters is that it keeps happening. The one who nurtures their own garden and the one who pays someone else to do it are doing the same thing, for the same reason. They understand the garden isn’t finished just because the building of it is.
Why and how gardens go bad
I’ve also seen the other version of a garden. One that was beautifully built, handed over, and then left. Nobody’s in there making decisions about it anymore. Nobody’s responding to what it’s doing. It’s not even being maintained in any meaningful sense and it’s definitely not being nurtured. It’s just sitting there, growing anyway, because that’s what plants do whether you’re involved with them or not. But it’s growing without any direction at all.
That’s when gardens go sour. Not because the original design was wrong, and not usually because anyone stopped caring in some dramatic way. It’s much simpler than that. It’s just that original creation of this garden expired, and nothing replaced it. Once the nurturing stops, a garden isn’t being kept as it was and it isn’t being shaped into what it could become. It’s just drifting along. And a garden left to drift for long enough eventually stops looking like anyone’s vision at all.
What this actually means before you start creating a new garden
If you’re at the stage of thinking about creating a garden, this is something worth thinking about before your garden design is even drawn. Ask yourself what you’re actually prepared to give to the ongoing creation of your garden, once it’s handed over to you by the landscaping team. Not out of guilt, just out of honesty.
Some clients want to be hands on with their gardens, out there in them every weekend, watching what’s happening and responding to it. Others want their garden to be nurtured on their behalf, which is exactly what a good maintenance relationship with the right people should actually mean. Not just trying to keep it in the same condition, but someone managing its future, someone making decisions on your garden’s behalf.
Either way is fine. What isn’t fine is assuming the creation of your garden stops the day the landscaping work finishes. Because that’s the assumption that leaves the most wondrous gardens unfinished before they’ve even had the chance to become themselves.
In the end, the one thing to remember is this. A garden isn’t just created in a single period of time. It needs to be constantly created. That single original creation needs to be continued. So it’s create, create, create, create and keep creating. That’s what brings a garden into being everything it has the potential to be. And keeps transforming it into something new every season.
Andrew Whyte has spent 35 years designing and building gardens across Melbourne’s bayside and south-east. Whyte Gardens designs every garden knowing the build is only the first act of its creation, and the client’s own nurturing habits are what continues to create that garden into the future.
