When Dan approached me about writing this article, it chimed with me having been on a similar journey of discovery myself. I was moved to pursue gardening in the first place because I wanted to be out of the office and a healthier, more wholesome, life. I wanted a closer and more intimate relationship with the rest of the living world and to care for the environment in a practical, meaningful way. Only I discovered that many “traditional” gardening practices that I was led to believe I should carry out were deeply destructive, extractive and unsustainable. It left me feeling a little confused and at times, stuck.
I think coming to this awareness and facing up to this “guilt” ultimately makes us better gardeners. It know it called on me to think more deeply about the actions I take and choices I make.
This isn’t about wallowing in guilt. Nor should we allow our cognitive dissonance to make excuses in defence of our actions so we don’t have to adjust. A healthy guilt can help us correct harmful behaviour. And I think there are a few of those from a gardening perspective if we care to look a little more deeply. Gardening is only made more pleasurable and satisfying, I think, when we know we are doing our best to care for the earth.
Gardener’s Guilt, by Dan Masoliver
For the gardener, ignorance is bliss. I remember my first forays to the local garden centre, when I would enthusiastically stack my trolley with sacks of multipurpose compost, without a second thought or a care in the world. Today, that happy naivety is a distant memory.
How many black plastic pots have I brought home over the years, without once considering their final resting place? How many plants have I purchased without first crumbling the compost at their base between my fingers, to guess at its composition? How much damage have I done to the wider wild world in my attempts to cultivate my small inner city patch?
If you have ever asked yourself these questions, then perhaps you and I suffer from the same affliction: Gardener’s Guilt. It is an unfortunate phenomenon, and one that correlates directly with a sort of horticultural enlightenment. The more you know, the worse it gets.
I first started gardening around six years ago, when my partner and I moved into our home in Walthamstow, East London. The backyard of a typical Victorian terrace, the short-and-stout garden consisted of a small square of lawn, surrounded on three sides by narrow borders. The garden was overgrown with plants I didn’t recognise, which isn’t saying much – back then I would have struggled to pick a rose out of a line-up. I had no knowledge and no experience, but what I did have was a shedload of good intentions.
I would grow food. I would create a haven for birds, bees, maybe even the occasional hedgehog. I would curate an outdoor room, an entertainment space for friends and family, like the ones I’d seen on the telly and in the pages of magazines. And so I set about gardening.
I made blunder after blunder, planting things in the wrong place, or too closely together; over-watering some, under-watering others. I lost an entire crop of brassicas to a biblical plague of cabbage white caterpillars, because instead of netting the plants, I had tried to take photos of the little white butterflies flitting around their leaves.
I learnt from these mistakes, and went to great lengths to educate myself on how to become a better gardener. I bought packets of seeds chosen for their cultivated resistance to pests and disease. I then sowed these in flimsy black plastic seed trays. When the time was right, I transplanted the sprouted seedlings into the ground, to which I applied a generous sprinkling of all-purpose fertiliser, and a handful of slug pellets for good measure.
I was following the traditional gardener’s rulebook to the letter, and it was working. Here I was, becoming a proper gardener. My plants were growing, and growing well. I felt proud. What I didn’t realise at the time was the untold harm I was causing in the process.
My earliest symptoms of Gardener’s Guilt were brought on by a Gardener’s World segment on peat. Monty Don had been throwing around the term “peat-free” for a while, but I’d never really engaged with what this meant. I was vaguely aware that peat had something to do with bogs – which didn’t sound particularly pleasant or precious – and that it was often burned for fuel. But that’s where my knowledge ended. I’d never seen the word “peat” on any of the bags of compost I’d bought from the garden centre, so assumed that they must not have contained any. A chocolate bar wrapper tells you how many grams of sugar it contains; surely a product that contained this peat stuff would do the same?
Now, of course, I know better. I know that it takes thousands of years for mature peatlands to develop. I know that these peatlands, globally, store twice as much carbon as all the world’s forests. I know that peat bogs are beautiful, unique and fragile ecosystems, providing habitat for a whole host of rare plants and wildlife. I know that peat continues to be gouged out of the earth and mixed into almost every single bag of compost on the market. And I know that the only way you can be sure that your shop-bought compost is peat-free is if it explicitly says so on the pack.
So I sucked up the additional cost of purchasing peat-free compost. And in many instances, like so many other conscientious gardeners, I turned to coir, which is usually described as a sustainable byproduct of coconut production. And so with a clean conscience, I started buying coir-based products: growing media, hanging baskets, propagation pots.
Until, that is, I came across an Instagram post that detailed the myriad ways in which coir is itself intensely problematic. It is a byproduct, yes, but of a coconut industry that tends to clear vast swathes of biodiverse rainforest and replace it with an ecologically disastrous monoculture. It is a byproduct, but one that would traditionally be used by coconut farmers as a mulch on their crops, and is now instead shipped halfway around the world, with the farmers in turn relying on imported chemical products to do the job that coir once did. It is a byproduct, until, that is, new coconut plantations are created purely to meet the swelling global demand for coir.
Every aspect of gardening presents us with these moral minefields. I had no idea that seed packets labelled as F1 – of which I had bought many, over the years – contain hybrid seeds that produce plants which are either sterile or do not come true from the seed they then produce*. Nor that these seeds are produced by agrochemical companies, and that four such companies are thought to control more than 60% of global seed trade. Nor that these same F1 seeds are sterile, which means that when you grow your tomatoes or courgettes or what have you from them, you cannot save the subsequently produced seed for the following year’s crop – an inconvenience for domestic gardeners, but a financially crippling cycle of dependence for farmers, especially in the global south. It is thought that we have lost an estimated 75% of genetic diversity in plants globally, as a result. Another dose of guilt.
The list of terrible things I didn’t know about my gardening practices grew longer by the season. I didn’t know that the machines used in most recycling centres to sort through household waste can’t “see” black plastic, which means any discarded pots or seed trays inevitably end up in landfill. I didn’t know that the phosphorus contained in my plant feeds and fertilisers is a scarce resource, and that we are predicted to reach peak phosphorus within the next decade, after which worldwide food production will be plunged into an even deeper crisis. I don’t eat beef (or any meat, for that matter) for ethical and environmental reasons; so why have I historically been so happy to throw well-rotted cow dung – another byproduct of another harmful industry – onto my beds and borders? Guilt, guilt, and more guilt.
The list goes on, each passing realisation bringing about a sort of epiphany. The cumulative effect was a kind of decision paralysis: everything I had learned needed to be unlearned. Everything I thought was technically right was ethically wrong. And the more I understood about the mainstream horticulture industry and my dependence upon it, the more acutely I’d feel those guilty pangs. Sometimes tending to my garden has felt less like a calming pastime, and more a source of stress.
But I’m trying. Trying to be a better gardener, in every sense of the word. And honestly, I think trying is all any of us can do. I avoid buying peat-based compost, but I can’t guarantee that I won’t buy a young plant in a 2L pot that may or may not have been grown using peat. I will endeavour to save seed, and swap it, rather than buying new, and when I do buy I will try to ensure that it is from an organic or sustainable supplier. Instead of relying purely on garden centres and nurseries, I will take cuttings and divide perennials, and share these new plants with friends – and hope that they will do the same with me. I will try to get as much use out of the black plastic that I have, and not acquire any more. But there are times I might not do these things, because I am far from perfect – so what then? Am I destined to feel Gardener’s Guilt for the rest of my growing days?
Not if I can help it. I’ve come to realise that the same epiphany moments that led to feelings of guilt in the first instance can actually be turned into something far more positive. Yes, I’ve learnt how my previous gardening practices have been environmentally and ecologically harmful, but rather than beat myself up about it in a sort of horticultural self-flagellation, wouldn’t it be better to celebrate these revelations, and use them to guide my future growing habits?
I had always aspired to garden responsibly, in harmony with ecosystems and all of their inhabitants; for not only my own health and well-being, but that of the natural world too. And actually, learning about peat, and about coir, and F1 seeds and phosphorus mining and black plastic pots, and no doubt many more besides in the years to come, has empowered me to try to fulfil those aspirations. Gardener’s Guilt didn’t make me a better gardener in the past; but the learning that caused that guilt can make me a better gardener in the future.
These days, a visit to the garden centre entails some introspection and soul-searching. For all the guilt I have felt each time my eyes have been opened, my gardening is now more thoughtful, more considered, better researched. It is still enjoyable. It just requires me to dig a little deeper (just not too deep – I wouldn’t want to inadvertently release loads of carbon into the atmosphere, now would I…!).
Dan Masoliver is a trained horticulturist and freelance writer from London. He is the author of The Earthworm, a newsletter that takes a sideways look at the world of gardens, gardening and horticulture. You can find Dan on Instagram @dan.the.earthworm
Dan has donated this article to Radicle.
Photo credits: Dan Masoliver
*Correction: please note the original version of this article stated that F1 seeds are genetically modified, which is incorrect. F1 seeds are hybrids. You can read more about the problem with F1 seeds, and also a note on GMOs at the bottom of the same page, over at Real Seeds here: https://www.realseeds.co.uk/why.html