Hello Reader,

The patio shelf was clean. The plants were ready. I painted my terracotta pots all week in a charcoal-colored lime wash, to coordinate with a rust and deep purple color scheme that I could already see in my mind. Something cohesive and unusual.

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.

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.

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 get stuck, 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 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. Nothing like the sheltered, secret garden rooms they would become after forty years of patience.

Johnston spent forty years on that garden. 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 doesn't click, 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 in that uncomfortable in-between. But it is asking me to keep working at it. Moving pots, trying colors, getting it wrong and trying again, until something clicks.

Continuing to work through design ideas works. 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.

The patio will get there too.

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

It's not easy to be look at something you've made, dislike it, and keep going anyway. Our willingness to work through the awkward beginnings and to show our work before it's beautiful is important.

The work of making something extraordinary happens in the uncomfortable in-between. The bare hedgerows. The undersized plants. The patio that isn't working. The willingness to stay with that, to keep going, is where beautiful gardens begin.

​
Sue