They are, on balance, probably right. That does not make watching it happen any easier.
Our local community garden group voted, at Tuesday’s meeting, to gradually remove a significant stretch of non-native flowering plants I personally planted the better part of five years ago, in favour of a considerably more comprehensive native wildflower scheme designed specifically to better support local pollinator populations, and I want to be entirely honest in this diary entry that despite genuinely, intellectually agreeing with the underlying reasoning, I spent a good portion of Tuesday evening feeling considerably more wounded by the decision than I expected to, given how confidently I would have argued the exact same position myself in almost any other context.
The plants in question were, by any reasonable ecological standard, a genuinely questionable choice five years ago, chosen largely because they were cheap, reliably colourful, and available in bulk at the local garden centre during a specific week when I had rather more enthusiasm than actual horticultural knowledge behind my planting decisions. I knew, even at the time, that native alternatives would have served the local ecosystem considerably better. I planted the non-natives anyway, partly out of impatience and partly, if I am honest, because they simply looked more immediately impressive to visitors than the slower, subtler native alternatives I had genuinely considered and ultimately talked myself out of.
Five years on, watching a considerably more knowledgeable and considerably more patient group of newer garden members present a genuinely well-researched case for replacing exactly what I planted, citing specific local pollinator survey data showing measurably lower insect activity around my non-native beds compared to the native plantings elsewhere in the same garden, I found myself in the genuinely uncomfortable position of agreeing entirely with the argument while still feeling something close to grief about watching my own five-year-old planting decision get, essentially, publicly and correctly overturned.
I think there is something worth naming honestly here about the specific emotional difficulty of being wrong, even gently, even collaboratively, even when the people correcting you are demonstrably right and are doing so with genuine care rather than any hint of unkindness. It is considerably easier to write, in the abstract, about the importance of native planting for pollinator health than it is to actually stand in a garden and watch your own specific, personally invested choice get replaced by something objectively better, chosen by people who were considerably more careful than you were when you made your original decision.
The replanting work begins properly next month, and I have, somewhat to my own surprise, volunteered to help with it directly rather than simply stepping back and letting the newer members handle a project I feel some genuine complicated feelings about. I think that volunteering is, in its own way, the most honest response available to me here: not pretending the wounded feeling does not exist, but also not letting it prevent me from actually doing the better, more ecologically sound work now that I understand more clearly than I did five years ago.
I will, I suspect, feel a small pang watching those particular flowers actually come out of the ground, however confidently I currently agree with the decision on paper. Growth, in gardens and apparently in the people tending them, rarely arrives without at least a small, honest cost attached, and I think pretending otherwise would be considerably less useful, both to this diary and to my own actual understanding, than simply sitting with the discomfort and doing the better work regardless.
One of the newer members who presented the native planting research, a genuinely thoughtful young woman I had not properly spoken with before Tuesday’s meeting, came to find me afterward specifically to say she hoped the vote had not felt like a personal criticism, and I appreciated the gesture more than I quite knew how to say in the moment. I told her, honestly, that it had stung a little regardless of her kind intentions, and that this was, on balance, entirely fine, an honest cost worth paying for a garden that will genuinely serve the local ecosystem considerably better than my own five-year-old choices ever managed to.
She asked, before we parted, whether I would be willing to help document the replanting process properly for the group’s records, a before-and-after account of exactly what changes and what effect it has on measured pollinator activity over the following seasons. I said yes immediately, partly because it is genuinely useful, valuable work, and partly, I will admit, because helping document my own correction feels like a considerably more honest way to process the whole experience than simply nursing the wounded feeling privately and staying away from the project entirely.
I have already started sketching out, in a fairly rough personal notebook, exactly what that documentation might look like, monthly photographs from a fixed vantage point, a simple informal pollinator count taken at the same time each week, something considerably less rigorous than a proper scientific survey but considerably more useful than the purely anecdotal impression the garden group has relied on until now. If nothing else, five years from today, whoever tends this same patch of ground will have an actual record to consult, rather than simply another well-meaning gardener’s untested assumptions, which is, I think, the most useful thing I can genuinely offer this particular correction of my own earlier mistake.
More from this author at Öko Angebot, prat.uk.