There was a great piece in the San Francisco Chronicle yesterday by columnist Leah Garchik about her experience with having a garden consultant evaluate her garden. It sounded painful-- wrenching, actually--and I can well imagine how I'd feel in hearing a garden "expert" dissect my very imperfect garden. It's one thing to look at your garden yourself and come up with your own long list of problems. It's quite another to have someone come in with the veil of authority, survey your lovingly if erratically tended plot, and see only the disorders and disasters.
We all want to have a beautiful garden. And experts can be very useful--on a problem by problem basis. But I think it's best to see the big picture through our own eyes. Deep down, I know there's nothing wrong with my garden that a ton of compost, several hundred dollars worth of new plants, and a jackhammer couldn't fix. But to get that prescription from some so-called expert would be devastating. Who needs it?
Like Garchik, I think sometimes you need to ignore the experts and just keep gardening.
I call the apparent defects in my garden, "charming idiosyncracies" :)
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