I started gardening in the 1970s, when advice was simple, local, and often passed on by someone who had made the mistakes before you. You learned by watching plants fail, succeed, and surprise you. You learned by turning up in all weathers and dealing with whatever the garden — or the client — threw at you.
Today, I read modern gardening advice and often feel like I’m reading about a completely different activity.
The certainty is what strikes me first. Everything now seems to have a rule, a system, or a branded method. Don’t dig. Always dig. Mulch once. Never mulch. Only native plants. Never native plants. One-size-fits-all answers delivered with absolute confidence.
Gardens have never worked like that.
In the 1970s, we didn’t pretend there was a universal solution. Soil mattered. Aspect mattered. Weather mattered. What worked in one village failed in the next. Advice came with caveats, not hashtags.
Much of today’s advice feels disconnected from that reality. It often assumes perfect conditions: good soil, reasonable drainage, predictable seasons, and gardeners who have unlimited time and physical ability. But most real gardens are compromised spaces — shaded by buildings, compacted by machinery, altered by climate change, and tended by people doing their best with what they have.
I also don’t recognise the pace. Gardening advice now moves as quickly as fashion. Plants are “in” one year and gone the next. Styles are rebranded before they’ve had time to settle. Gardens are redesigned before the original planting has even reached maturity. In the past, we expected gardens to take time. Now they are expected to perform immediately.
Another change is the shift from observation to instruction. Older gardeners learned to watch. You noticed where frost lingered, where water sat, where plants struggled year after year. Modern advice often skips this entirely, replacing it with lists, templates, and shopping links.
And then there is failure — or rather, the lack of it. Gardening advice today rarely admits uncertainty or mistakes. But failure was once central to learning. You remembered the plant that died every winter, the border that never worked, the hedge that sulked for a decade. That memory shaped better decisions the next time.
This is not nostalgia, and it is not an attack on younger gardeners or new ideas. Many modern techniques are valuable, and new gardeners bring energy and curiosity the industry needs. But gardening loses something when experience is dismissed as outdated rather than understood as context.
Gardens don’t care what decade your advice comes from. They care about weather, soil, roots, and time. The fundamentals haven’t changed nearly as much as the language around them.
Perhaps the problem isn’t that modern advice is wrong. It’s that it’s often incomplete — stripped of the patience, uncertainty, and local knowledge that gardening has always required.
I’ve been gardening since the 1970s, and I still don’t claim to have all the answers. That, more than anything, is what makes me suspicious of advice that does.
Gardens, after all, have a way of humbling anyone who thinks they’ve finally cracked it.
