Hello Reader,

The patio shelf was clean. The plants were ready. I had been painting terracotta pots all week in a charcoal-colored lime wash, to coordinate with a rust and deep purple palette that I could already see in my mind. Something cohesive, intentional, and beautiful.

I carried everything outside and arranged it the way I imagined. I was expecting to step back and see an image worthy of Claus Dalby's container gardening book. When I stepped back, all I saw was an average group of pots.

It wasn't the plants. Or the color palette. It was the arrangement. The scale felt wrong. The shelf felt cluttered. Nothing clicked the way I had expected it to. I moved pots around hoping something would reveal itself. It didn't.

And then the forecast called for cold nights, so I carried everything back inside and put it away.

That is where we are now. Late April in Kentucky, right on the edge of the season, with everything I need to create something beautiful sitting in pots on the patio table, waiting.

When I feel that gap between vision and reality, I reach for books. I always have. It turns out Lawrence Johnston did too.

In 1907, Johnston arrived at Hidcote Manor in Gloucestershire with a farmhouse, nearly 300 acres of windswept Cotswold hillside, poor soil, and almost no garden to speak of. He was a self-taught amateur. He had no professional training in garden design. What he had were books, a developing eye, and the willingness to begin.

He began planting hedgerows. Laying out garden rooms. Putting young topiary into cold ground on an exposed hillside, knowing he would spend decades waiting for them to become what he could already see in his mind.

I have stood inside those hedgerows. I visited Hidcote years ago and it changed something in me, the way all great gardens do.

What I didn't fully understand then, looking at photographs in a booklet I purchased in the garden shop, was that I was seeing the destination. The completed vision.

A photograph taken early in Hidcote's life shows those same hedgerows bare and young and barely there. Nothing like the sheltered, secret garden rooms they would become over forty years of patient, uncertain work.

Johnston spent forty years on that garden. Forty years of arrangements that weren't right yet. Forty years of the uncomfortable in-between.

And he was not alone. Every gardener I have ever admired, the ones whose books I reach for when something isn't working, was a self-taught amateur, learning from books, trying things in real life, willing to begin before they knew how it would turn out.

Where Beautiful Gardens Begin

The garden is asking something of me right now. Now. In the uncomfortable in-between. While things look awkward and off.

It is asking me to take the creative plunge anyway. To keep working at it. Moving pots, trying combinations, getting it wrong and trying again, until something clicks.

I have proof that it's possible. Earlier this week I made a living wreath from grapevines I foraged from Sugar Hill, relined with coir, and planted with flowers I found at Walmart. It is hanging on my patio right now and it is exactly what I imagined. Unexpected. Interesting.

The patio will get there too. Not all at once. Not on the first try. It will get there because I am willing to stay with it.

I think about Johnston planting those bare hedgerows on a cold Cotswold hillside, working from garden books, with no guarantee of what they would become.

I think about every self-taught amateur who ever looked at something they made, hated it and kept going anyway. Their willingness to work through the awkward beginning, to show their work before it was beautiful, is what made everything great possible.

The whole work of making something extraordinary happens in the uncomfortable in-between. The bare hedgerows. The undersized plants. The patio that isn't there yet. The willingness to stay with that, to keep going before it looks like anything, is not the obstacle to the beautiful garden. It's where the beautiful garden begins.

​
Sue