A Garden from Scratch: 8 Mistakes I Made as a Beginner Gardener

Hindsight is a wonderful thing: After you’ve planted, say, a tree in the wrong spot, everything becomes clearer and more crystallized—including where you should have planted it. Making mistakes is a vital part of understanding why a design works, or why a plant will thrive in one place but not in another.

When I started my garden from scratch ten years ago, I knew very little about actual gardening. My experience was limited to arranging a few pretty pots to have around the house, my plantsmanship was near zero, and I had very little funds to throw away on errors. Yet, that didn’t stop me from making them. Here are a few of the bigger mistakes I made when designing and planting a garden from scratch.

Photography by Clare Coulson.

1. Being impatient.

Recently I’ve been working on a book, interviewing many landscape designers, and a commonality that emerges is that, in their own gardens, they all watch and wait. The time spent doing nothing more than staring at the garden allows them to observe trees, shrubs, and plants in all seasons. Watching and waiting also allows them to understand how the light falls in the garden at different times of year, how the weather moves through the garden, and how they themselves move through it—all of which will then inform their eventual garden design and planting.

2. Making the beds too narrow.

Without exception, I’ve made almost all of my borders wider over time where possible, and if I were starting over again, I’d make them even deeper. Generous borders are more impactful and allow bolder views across plantings and more complex compositions.

3. Planting trees too late.

If you have space to plant trees, then make this one of your earliest interventions since they take years and years to mature. I wish I’d planted a field of trees or an orchard when I arrived at my garden; instead I procrastinated for years and my field is still a relatively blank canvas.

4. Not prioritizing soil quality.

Consider carefully your dirt. If you’re moving earth around or taking up turf, keep it in a pile to reincorporate into the garden as topsoil. When creating new borders, add as much humus-rich organic matter as you can into any planting areas—it’s far easier to do this at the outset of your garden-making, when you have room to work and make a mess. And if you are creating paths or borders with straight lines, then take the time to get them truly straight—a wonky straight line will annoy you for years to come.