---
title: Why Every Landscape Needs a Fine Gardener
description: There comes a time in many a property owner’s life when he or she looks around and realizes that their landscaping is boring. Same old boring shrubs that need to be trimmed every year. Same old trees that need to be pruned, beds weeded, grass mowed. Boring, boring, boring.
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---

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[Landscape and Garden Maintenance](https://www.thegardencontinuum.com/blog/tag/landscape-and-garden-maintenance) | 3 min read

May 2018

# Why Every Landscape Needs a Fine Gardener

![Monique Allen](https://www.thegardencontinuum.com/hubfs/Monique-Allen-Headshot-Leaning-on-Tree.jpeg) [Monique Allen](https://www.thegardencontinuum.com/blog/author/monique-allen)

![Why Every Landscape Needs a Fine Gardener](https://www.thegardencontinuum.com/hubfs/Imported_Blog_Media/Focused-care-on-perennial-beds-to-keep-themlush-and-beautiful-Jul-13-2022-04-31-20-28-PM.jpg)

There comes a time in many a property owner’s life when he or she looks around and realizes that their landscaping is boring. Same old boring shrubs that need to be trimmed every year. Same old trees that need to be pruned, beds weeded, grass mowed. Boring, boring, boring.

**That’s when it’s time to move from plain, old, vanilla, status quo landscape maintenance to fine gardening.**

*Watch this video as Monique demystifies Fine Gardening*

 

**Here’s reality:** the industry average for our landscapes is status quo care. You plant stuff, help it grow, keep it neat. It may not be exciting, but it works. Think of it this way – as humans we need to eat to stay alive. You can eat the same old things, day after day, to sustain your body. But that’s not *living*. That’s maintenance. Or, you can choose to stir things up and make eating interesting – try new and even exotic ingredients and dishes to tantalize your taste buds and make eating enjoyable. That’s fine dining.

Think of your landscape in the same way. You can work to maintain a status quo, season to season and year to year, or you can choose to work *with* your landscape and help it evolve as the living entity that it is. Landscapes don’t like to be frozen in time – they prefer to be “life-scapes,” responding to natural biological processes as they grow and mature.

Picture your landscape as a life-scape video and watch it grow, bloom, go dormant, and regenerate with the seasons. Whether you realize it or not, your landscape wants to make sense in nature and be organized according to natural laws. It wants to be vibrant and deliver a “Wow!” in the form of blossoms and color that help plants reproduce but also help draw us in with their beauty.

![fine gardening](https://www.thegardencontinuum.com/hs-fs/hubfs/Imported_Blog_Media/fine-gardening-2.png?width=800&height=600&name=fine-gardening-2.png)

## **Your landscape needs to make sense.**

Anything that grows and evolves over time won’t make sense if you try to freeze it in time and maintain that status quo. Landscapes are like puppies – you can’t keep them as roly-poly fluff balls forever. You have to nurture and respond to them as they grow and turn into incredible adult-dog companions.

It’s important to embrace your landscape as a living, breathing, evolving thing and understand how all the elements in it work in harmony. Having the skill set to know when your landscape is out of whack is crucial. [That’s when you need a Fine Gardener](https://www.thegardencontinuum.com/fine-gardening-discovery-session-request) to help make sense of it all and ensure both beauty and balance.

## **Healthy garden, happy garden.**

Gardens should be healthy and vibrant. When they are, they’re working in harmony -- plants, soil, and overall environment. A healthy garden is better able to withstand the myriad outside pressures they face from weather, pests, disease and the normal fluctuation of seasons and the landscape.

![monique-horse](https://www.thegardencontinuum.com/hs-fs/hubfs/Imported_Blog_Media/monique-horse-2.png?width=300&name=monique-horse-2.png)**Fine Gardeners are always in assessment mode.** Even the horse in the image to the right is keenly interested! Is the color of that flower right? Is the break in that leaf normal? Is the landscape as vibrant as it can be? If the answer is no, a Fine Gardener has the skills to see that and guide the landscape back to vibrancy. The key is to work using the horticultural standards of professional gardening. Put another way, someone used to simply maintaining a landscape looks at it as a single unit – is everything neat and trimmed up? A fine gardening mind looks at individual plants to evaluate their specific condition as well as their collective place in the overall landscape. Is it appropriate, balanced, and contributing to a harmonious “Wow!”?

Of course, “Wow!” is transient. A landscape is not in a state of perpetual “Wow!” However, as gardeners, we can control the “Wow!” to a large degree by incorporating décor, seasonal planters, and other attention-getting elements or features, such as a pond or other water feature. The maintenance mind does not have time for that “Wow!” It must go from one property to another quickly, where a Fine Gardener looks for ways to bring “Wow!” to the property. The Fine Gardener will spend more time on a property to understand how it works and and figure out the best ways to implement functionality and “Wow!”.

## **Reap the benefits of fine gardening**

When I started in the landscape business in the late 80’s there was no fine gardening. Back then it was all about landscape maintenance. I was initially hired as the “flower girl” to plant bare root perennials – they weren’t even sold in pots back then. In the 90’s I realized that what I was doing was “finer” than maintenance-type landscaping and soon I was brought in by maintenance-style landscape companies to provide a new level of beauty and harmony to their projects.

![](https://www.thegardencontinuum.com/hubfs/Imported_Blog_Media/twitter-logo_black_100-1-Jul-13-2022-04-34-11-87-PM.png)

## TWEETABLE TIP

### Anything that grows and evolves over time won’t make sense if you try to freeze it in time and maintain that status quo.

#### VIA @GardenContinuum

[![Share on Twitter](https://www.thegardencontinuum.com/hs-fs/hubfs/Imported_Blog_Media/TWEET-THIS-Jul-13-2022-04-34-13-41-PM.png?width=120&name=TWEET-THIS-Jul-13-2022-04-34-13-41-PM.png) ](https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=https://tgc.tips/2G47vPp&text=Anything%20that%20grows%20and%20evolves%20over%20time%20won’t%20make%20sense%20if%20you%20try%20to%20freeze%20it%20in%20time%20and%20maintain%20that%20status%20quo.&via=GardenContinuum)

Now you see the opportunity to fine garden everywhere, but the maintenance mentality can be tough to overcome. As a Fine Gardener, you have to pay closer attention to your landscape because it is unique – to see all the elements for what they are and how they work together. As a Fine Gardener, you develop the ability and desire to think ahead so you can respond and work *with* nature rather than react *to* her. And, Fine Gardeners are also great partners to work with because they will always consider the client in the working equation.

So if your landscape has become boring, perhaps it’s because you’ve been in maintenance mode all along. Now’s the time to expand, explore, and embrace natural change and progression as a good thing that can bring added beauty, joy and, yes, excitement to your landscape. [It’s time for Fine Gardening!](https://www.thegardencontinuum.com/fine-gardening-discovery-session-request)

Learn what Fine Gardening is all about by reading our eBook titled, [The Fine Gardener's Guide to a Beautiful and Luxurious Landscape](https://www.thegardencontinuum.com/the-fine-gardeners-guide-to-a-beautiful-luxurious-landscape)!  

[![fine gardeners guide to a beautiful and luxurious landscape](https://no-cache.hubspot.com/cta/default/22032217/ead43618-a5f0-4f1a-81ca-f6c4bde9d0ed.png)](https://cta-redirect.hubspot.com/cta/redirect/22032217/ead43618-a5f0-4f1a-81ca-f6c4bde9d0ed)

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"transcript": "Hi, welcome to notes from the field, the garden continuum’s video blog. I'm Monique Allen and today I'd like to take a few minutes to demystify the term fine gardening. So way back in the beginning of my career, like in the eighties, very few homeowners use the term fine gardening to describe the work that they needed to be done on their landscape. And while not a new term, the first time I heard it was from a magazine, it was called fine gardening and published by Taunton press. They still publish the magazine is a beautiful magazine and now they have a digital site that you can get how to videos, plant guides, gardening tips, design tips. It's just a really, really great site. And for me it meant more like learning about the real high points of gardening. Well today fine gardening has started to be used quite commonly by both homeowners and service providers as well as box stores and garden centers. And the thing that I find that's happening is that the two terms, landscape maintenance, landscaping, um, even lawn care, uh, and find gardening are being used interchangeably. And truth be told, that kind of gets my knickers in a knot a little bit because they are really quite different things. Starting with landscape maintenance, I see landscape maintenance as the big moves that you have to make in the landscape. So for all intents and purposes, it's managing the lawn, the leaves, the big open bed areas and the snow and it's bulk work and it's really important and it can. There can be a lot of heavy lifting and a lot of fast moving. So super, super important stuff that has to be done. So the idea is keep chaos, keep chaos at bay, and to keep everything neat, clean and safe. I see fine gardening as more horticulturally focused. It's really about the horticultural function. It's about the aesthetic. It's about making sure that you have a lot of health and beauty synergizing through the landscape all at the same time. Now the important thing about fine gardening is that evolution and growth are not only accepted, they're expected in the landscape. In other words, we're not trying to keep nature down or in control, in control. We're not trying to subjugate nature into some specific form or look. In other words, we know that if we plan to cherry tree that when we first planted it's tiny and over the years it's going to grow and expand a bit on the top. The trunk is going to get bigger and the top is going to get bigger, and because of that you may go from a sun garden to a shade garden. The other things that's going to happen is that tree is now going to send out a ton of roots and it starts. It's going to start occupying most of the soil niche down below, so the plants that we're able to cohabitate with that cherry easily, we'll be able to anymore. So the point is there's a lot with fine gardening. You're really looking at all the horticulture and and how to work within an ecosystem with all of the players. So there's a necessity for a fine gardener to have a lot of skills. First off, find gardeners are great problem solvers. Here's the thing, there is no way to excel as a fine gardener if your expectation is to deliver repeatable, predictable services based on a calendar. It's just not how it works. Fine gardeners need to visit a site, assess a site, and then make decisions based on what they see and, and the things that they're seeing has a lot to do with what's going on in nature. So number two, fine gardeners are committed partners with nature. There is no way to deliver fine gardening services if you're not paying attention to your local climate, to the weather patterns, to what's going on with insects and diseases, to what maybe up with a certain plant post-storm what's happening, what plants were affected. So the idea is understanding that nature is a one-on-one partner with gardening is really, really important. And third, fine gardeners are just naturally passionate about the work. So often you'll find that fine gardeners are plant geeks. They may be real and design enthusiasts and not just around plants. They may be designed enthusiastic around collecting antiques. Um, cars, stonework, I mean, there's lots of things, but generally find gardening. Fine gardeners are enthusiastic about things in nature, so the cool thing about that is that if they're enthusiastic personally and they're passionately following something and then they're also working for you, you know that they're bringing that passion to the job every day. You're probably wondering how a fine gardener even becomes a fine gardener. Now. Of course there's a lot of study involved, so there's a lot of different threads that one could follow from botany to horticulture to soil science. I mean there's a lot, but the truth of the matter is most fine gardening gardeners are learning hands on, so a lot of people who come to work for the garden continuum are actually starting as avid gardeners themselves and then learning the trade by doing it. It's how I learned. I started out as an apprentice and just kept learning and learning and then I added the book learning on top of it. So one cool thing is I started out my career, the first 10 years of being a fine gardener. I was an apartment dweller and so I didn't have a landscape of my own and so basically what I did was I started with window sills and then moved to window boxes and then got like a mini little deck or I had a door that went from like an outside opening so I could have planters, so most of my learning really came from container gardening and then little by little I ended up planning apartments that had a bigger deck or ultimately I landed an apartment that had a big deck and also had a yard that I convinced the landlord to let me take over and beautify. So fine. Gardening really has a lot to do with how much you are paying attention to the, to the garden, to the plants, and watching the evolution of what's going on. That's an amazing partner to have in your landscape, so you're probably asking yourself, do I need to find gardener, but I have to get rid of my landscape maintenance people? No, no, no, no, no. The great news is there's room for both. I as a fine Gardner, incredibly appreciate the people that I work with who do the lawn care, the big leaf cleanup. I appreciate my tree people because we don't do big tree work, so partnering in landscape work is really, really great, but one thing you may also be wondering is, well, why don't I start doing landscape maintenance? Why doesn't a fine gardener also decide to do landscape maintenance? Here's the truth. Landscape maintenance and fine gardening are really two different businesses. Landscape maintenance requires that you hit properties quickly, repeatedly and you go from property to property to property. All you've got to think about is mowing the lawn. You don't spend all day mowing one lawn, you mow the lawn and you move on to the next property, and part of how you make your business work is you need to do it quickly, efficiently, and have the whole thing be effective. You'll find gardening is very different than that. Find Gardening, you're going to properties and you're working in the garden beds and basically you're going into a deep dive focus into that bed area. That could be quite expansive. It can be complicated and have a lot of horticulture going on, so the truth is fine gardening visits could take a half day or full day, and the truth is you don't really need fine gardening visits anymore than every other week, third week, or maybe even once a month. So the truth is the two business models don't work together. So ideally what happens is you have business partners with all that information you can probably see now buy fine gardening and landscape maintenance are both important. So I asked you if you're a homeowner and you are hiring a service provider, are they a fine gardener or are they a landscape maintenance company? Which do you need? Where's the gap? Great questions to ask to get the best possible service. And if you're a service provider, you may ask yourself what kind of landscape service provider am I? And you may find that some of the discomfort that happened sometimes in working is that you're asked to do both of those things, but you're not comfortable in it. You actually really like one of them better and if you do, that's great. Do that the best you possibly can, and then find your appropriate partner and team up. So I hope this information was useful and uh, I'd love to have some comments and questions below. I love that kind of after engagement. Please like and share this video. I'm Monique Allen. Thank you for watching and garden on.  " 
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