If a stranger were to come upon your garden one day when you were not there, what would they learn about you? Not just as a gardener, but as a person?
If you are a new gardener, perhaps the only clues we will get are whether you are neat or sloppy, or whether you have yet learned to tell a weed from a flower. You probably haven't had time to develop a gardening personality.
To those who have been gardening for a while, the garden is almost a mirror of the soul. The layout, the spacing, the colors, the types of plants can all give us a glimpse into the inner life of the gardener. You are what you plant.
Especially when we are beginning, too many of us plant by the books, ever wary of the eyes of others upon us, selecting and placing each flower as if the photographers from Horticulture might any day descend upon our yard and reveal it to the world. We strive to present a mask of perfection to the world that says little about what we are really like, or the things about which we are really passionate. Instead we plant tasteful gardens. Gardens that we can be sure our friends and acquaintances will admire, or at least find nothing about which to be critical. Gardens that say nothing about the gardener. Gardens that carefully follow all the "rules".
Well, let me tell you a big secret. There are no rules. Well -- almost no rules. You still can't put a water loving plant in a dust-dry spot, or a sunlover in shade; tender tropicals still won't live through blustering winters. Those are the rules of nature, and there is nothing we can do to alter them. But I'm talking about those other rules we think we have to follow -- the ones made by other gardeners. The ones that proclaim that red and yellow should never exist in the same bed, or that blue lobelia with alyssum is trite. Forget them.
The only rule to follow in your garden is to be true to yourself and what you love. There is a conventional wisdom in interior decorating that says that if you truly only buy what you really love, it will work. This seems to work because if you only buy those things that truly make the heart flutter madly, you tend to buy things that are in harmony with each other. They may not be to the taste of everyone who comes inside -- but it your home, not theirs. And in your home, you should be surrounded with what you love.
