Dead in a Ditch

This article by Marianne  Willburn on Garden Rant's blog resonated with me. She said what I have always thought. Photographs of my garden and my real garden are two different things, and despite taking great joy in what I'm creating, most of the time it looks dead in a ditch, not Instagrammable. Not like the photographs I take of it. Losses mount more than successes.

Moments of photographic glory in my former garden. It didn't often look this way.

"Dead in a ditch" is the spot-on phrase Dan Hinckley uses in his recent book about his own spectacular gardens in the Pacific Northwest. He has an amazing property and has published a book of beautiful pictures to showcase it, but he admits openly that it doesn't really look that way most of the time.

I am stunned when I go back and look at the many photos I took of my former garden in the east. It looked so good. Why was I so frustrated with it all? Because it rarely looked like that. I didn't take pictures of the empty spot, the dead plant, the failed design or the expanse of mud in March. I took pictures of what looked best at the time it looked best and saved those. Although there's this:

This is what the pavers and small wall looked like in March
with snow and clods of plowed up turf.

This is the photo I saved and posted
of the same area a little later.

Close up shots are misleading. Marianne Willburn shows an example in her article -- she shows us a lovely hellebore in close detail, and then pulls back and we see how lost and insignificant it really is in brown spring blahness.

From Garden Rant blog

Glossy photographs and curated blog posts and feeds of Instagram outdoor spaces are endlessly misleading, although they are great inspiration. Close ups are only part of the story. Losses, frustrations, dead in a ditch scenes are the garden's reality much of the time.

And yet. As she points out in her article, we have such plans.