As a rule, the writer-gardeners here at GardenRant bypass “How-To Garden” posts for horticultural topics that are less apt to find themselves neatly summed up with bullet points and/or numbered steps.
Occasionally you’ll find honest experience and how-to with a plant or technique; but it’s usually because we’re tired of hearing exaggerated claims or simplistic, magic methods that are trending – and tracked – across the internet.
How To? Or Why To?
So, Anne Wareham isn’t going to tell you ‘How to Build a Garden’ (yes, that kind of whole picture, universally-simplistic, 3-minute readable, advice exists); but she’s going to give you the nitty gritty illustrated reality of why she and her husband Charles built a garden out of a scrubby, woods-shadowed field in Wales. And she’ll inspire you to keep killing yourself out there.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Susan Harris won’t give you the AI summation of how to prune your overgrown junipers, but she’ll help you understand why you may want to when you’re facing an ugly mess with no budget and no help. And how to overcome it.
(Just for the record Susan, you got it wrong according to Google’s Gemini, who instructs “avoid heavy pruning or shearing, especially after mid-summer.” And Anne, you really should have avoided building your nationally recognized garden on a slope and without an easy water source.)
You may not have ugly overgrown junipers or a garden that needs building from scratch, but there may be something else in your gardening world that requires creative thought and a flexible approach, and which won’t be solved by clickable lists or trending opinion.
AI summation and simplistic summaries don’t do ‘flexible’. And using creative adjectives doesn’t make how-to content creative.
That’s the point of GardenRant. You may indeed get what you need – just not in the way you think you needed it.
Building Connections, Not Clickable Content
Being ‘why’ focused in a ‘how-to’ marketplace is an interesting place to be. It makes us less key-word searchable; but ironically perhaps, it makes us less AI replaceable. Our viral moments are random and often amusing; but we don’t endeavor to replicate them with similar content. Discussions of our posts (and our characters!) often find their way onto Facebook groups or in corners of the internet; but as we don’t obsessively track, we rarely participate – only finding out about them until many months later, at a conference when meeting a stranger.
So be it. We enjoy being the alternative voice you accidently come across when you type “juniper pruning” or “garden building” or “amaryllis saving”, or even “Monty Don”. We’d like to be your cool aunts and uncles with shabby fingernails who take you botanizing when everyone else wants you to grow a bean seed in a classroom. We’re excited to wax esoteric, or academic, or political, or get downright irreverent over our picnic lunch on a hillside, lose ourselves in retrospection, then tell you to stay curious and break the rules and hand you a sneaky beer with a wink.
Yes you need to know how to grow a bean. But once you do, there’s GardenRant. Defiantly Uncategorical in a categorized & summarized world.
Happy to have you here – let’s keep following the ‘why’ together. – MW
Gardening Isn’t Straightforward. Neither is GardenRant. originally appeared on GardenRant on March 20, 2025.
The post Gardening Isn’t Straightforward. Neither is GardenRant. appeared first on GardenRant.
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