Sometimes in Gardening, Less is More

We loved this post cautioning against cramming as much as you can into the dirt and calling it ‘gardening’. This does raise an interesting, and often overlooked point.

Many novice gardeners look at their first patch of land to fill and simply keep squeezing in one more row of plants. Eventually you end up with a visual cacophony that would look right in a display at Disneyland, but is just too busy for the landscaping around your home.

What we find naturally pleasing to the eye in a garden is the same kind of thing we find pleasing about nature. And if you take a walk in the woods, you’ll notice that even in nature, grass does not grow right up to the edge of every tree trunk, nor do fifty kinds of flowers sprout in a five-foot plot. Nature is actually kind of sparse. In fact, if you’re having a hard time encouraging plants to grow, this just might be a clue that you’re choking them for air and sunshine.

There’s also the artistic aspect to consider. The blog makes the point “When you go out, do you put on every piece of jewelry that you own or do you select only a few that serve to highlight?” Since we’re on the web, we’ll use an even better metaphor: when you lay out a web page, you’re not supposed to fill it with every widget and doodad you can fit in.