Are Good Gardeners a Dying Breed?

Tidy Isn’t the Same as Alive.

Everywhere you look, landscapes are marched into obedience. Shrubs clipped into ottomans, trees reduced to apologetic poles, roses hacked as though they’d personally offended someone. These are not gardens; they’re evidence of a culture that has mistaken obedience for care.

And the strange thing? We’ve learned to accept it. Americans now drive past battalions of blocky shrubs and call them “well kept.” At the entrance to a grocery store or dentist’s office, we glance at the tidy cubes and spheres and feel reassured. It looks neat, and neat, apparently, is all we ask for anymore.

But neat is not the same as alive. Look closer: it isn’t wild. It isn’t even orderly in an interesting way. It’s just… neutered.

Once, gardening was a slower conversation. The gardener would pause, pruners in hand, and actually look. There was muttering, head-tilting, stepping back, reconsidering. Outsiders mistook it for dithering; insiders recognized it as discernment. In that silence lived the art of pruning a maple so its canopy glowed, of coaxing an azalea into bloom right  down its entire body, of giving a lilac the chance to fragrance another spring.

Now the pause has been drowned out by engines. The hedge trimmer does not hesitate. It does not care where a bud lies or how light falls. It flattens. Quickly, efficiently, endlessly.

The problem isn’t just the noise. It’s what the noise drowns out: judgment, subtlety, patience, care. The very qualities that separate gardeners from maintenance crews.

I think of a camellia once boxed so tightly that its blooms were stranded only at the tips, like ornaments on a forgotten Christmas tree. After seasons of careful thinning—windows opened here, awkward branches coaxed away there—it bloomed head to toe, relieved, as though it had been given back its breath.

I think of one of our new apprentices, handed pruners for the first time, staring at a hydrangea with the nervous reverence of someone holding a fragile bird. The first cut was timid, the second hesitant. Then came the smile—the realization that pruning was not destruction but release. That is how knowledge is kept alive, one revelation at a time.

And I think, too, of the homeowner proudly gesturing at three shrubs in a gravel bed and a tree flattened into a tray. “My garden,” they declared. And how could they know any better? They had never been shown another way. If all you’ve ever seen are clipped shapes, then clipped shapes become the standard.

This is how craft disappears—not with drama, but with forgetting. A generation grows up seeing only tidy landscapes and never learns that gardens can be otherwise. A gardener becomes a “maintenance technician.” A profession becomes a service line item. Slowly, almost politely, the knowledge fades.

Civilizations reveal themselves in what they preserve. The Egyptians left pyramids. The English tended borders that unfurled like novels across the seasons. We, it seems, are content with landscapes that resemble green furniture. Flatten the garden, and you flatten the culture. Confuse tidy with alive, and you risk forgetting what alive even looks like.

And yet, despair is foreign to gardeners. No one plants bulbs in October without faith in a future unseen. No one tends roses without believing in second chances. If good gardeners are a rarer breed, then the answer is not mourning—it is persistence.

When curiosity appears, we hand over the pruners. We invite people into the pause. We show them how to look again, how to wait before cutting, how to see the shape within the plant instead of imposing one upon it. Knowledge is not a treasure to guard; it is compost, useful only when spread.

So, are good gardeners a dying breed? Perhaps endangered, but not extinct. Not while we pause before cutting. Not while we mutter to ourselves in borders. Not while we choose care over efficiency, story over sameness.

The craft endures wherever patience outlasts noise. It survives in every thoughtful cut, every generous lesson, every plant coaxed back into dignity.

No one has ever gasped at a hedge shaped like a dinner roll. But many of us have caught our breath in a garden that felt alive. That, in the end, is the gardener’s gift. And that gift will not die—not while we are here to give it.