Despatches from the Front Line
Every gardener dreams of perfection. The wiser ones eventually learn that the secret isn’t winning every battle – it’s choosing which ones are worth fighting.
I was recently asked by a garden journalist for my top gardening tips. I mulled it over for several days because, to be honest, nothing earth-shattering sprang to mind.
I’ve always considered myself the sort of gardener who muddles through – instinctive rather than rule-based – and I’d struggle to produce a list of clever tips. I started jotting down the obvious: deadhead regularly, feed container plants every week, water during dry spells… but it all felt rather like stating the obvious. Gardeners already know these things, and non-gardeners probably aren’t interested.
Eventually I realised I didn’t really have any revolutionary tips to offer. What I did have was an overriding principle: choose your battles.
Gardening, like life, teaches us that time and energy are finite. Some jobs simply have to be done, however tedious. Watering pots through a hot summer isn’t exactly thrilling, but neither is taking an elderly relative to a hospital appointment or doing the daily school run. The satisfaction comes not from the task itself, but from knowing that the consequences of neglect would be far worse.
Some battles, however, demand a decisive response.
My first was the War on Rabbits. When I returned to Pond Cottage, it was clear they had enjoyed two decades of unchallenged occupation. They had become the undisputed rulers of the garden. It took me a while to realise that it wasn’t slugs relentlessly nibbling my new plants but leporine invaders. One afternoon my ever-vigilant builder counted 45 rabbits on the back meadow – and that was in broad daylight.
Drastic action was called for. One of my first major investments in restoring the property was rabbit-proof fencing around the entire garden. There are still the occasional skirmishes and I’m forever patching fences and filling in escape tunnels to outwit these determined adversaries, but this was one war that was largely won.
Other battles simply aren’t worth fighting.
With my heavy clay soil and mature shrubs, I’ve long since stopped trying to grow plants that clearly don’t want to be here. Salvias, achilleas and delphiniums have all had their chance. When a well-meaning neighbour kindly gave me some home-grown lupins, I was genuinely touched by the gesture, but knew instinctively they had “lost cause” written all over them. I bravely took up the call to arms but with so many other demands on my gardening time, I wondered how long they would survive. Not very long, as it turned out, and I have to say there was almost a sense of relief when the inevitable finally happened.
Slug defence, however, is a battle that has to be fought.
I confess to a certain nostalgia for the old blue slug pellets, before metaldehyde was banned because of its environmental impact. After trying every miracle cure under the sun, I’ve settled on beer traps made from yoghurt pots and cut-off plastic bottles sunk into the soil. They aren’t glamorous, they’re surprisingly expensive – John Smith’s Extra Smooth Ale has become a regular item on my supermarket order – and they need constant emptying and topping up. But they work. This year, for the first time, I managed to grow a successful crop of sunflowers that would have been devoured within days the previous summer.
Mind you, not every campaign ends in victory. One entire bed of dahlias disappeared despite an ever-growing army of beer traps, and one of my three avocado plants – patiently grown from stones – remains inexplicably irresistible to slugs. Why that one and not the others remains one of life’s little mysteries.
My latest white flag has been waved over a rosemary hedge.
Rosemary should have been perfect for the hot, south-facing rose cutting garden. It thrived through summer, only to succumb to our cold, waterlogged clay each winter. I tried improving the drainage, planting on raised mounds, adding grit and even sinking large pots into the ground. That solved the winter problem but created a summer one, as the irrigation couldn’t reach the roots. I eventually realised that adding another daily watering routine was a step too far. Sometimes the sensible decision is to admit defeat and plant something better suited to the conditions.
One battle I continue to fight is against the dreaded box tree moth caterpillar. Visitors to our Open Garden events often ask how I’ve managed to keep my box hedging looking healthy while so much elsewhere has been devastated. I’ve experimented with pheromone traps and organic methods, but neither proved effective in my garden. For now, XenTari remains the only approach that consistently works for me, and with decades invested in clipping and shaping my box hedging, it’s a battle I’m prepared to keep fighting.
Perhaps that’s the real lesson gardening has taught me.
Not every battle deserves your time. Some are unwinnable. Some simply aren’t worth the effort. But a few – those that really matter – are worth every ounce of determination you can muster.
Learning the difference may be the most valuable gardening tip of all.
1st August 2026