I wrote this a wee while ago and meant to post it immediately but life had other plans. Anyway, this is dedicated to the clients whose jobs I had to reschedule due to the unexpected absence. Here goes…

I can’t say that I am the best practitioner of Buddhist principles but I really don’t like killing things. It sounds obvious, but as a professional gardener it sometimes can’t be helped. Everything comes and goes, but uncovering a family of earthworms can upset me so whenever possible I try to relocate them to a safer environment to the one I’m working in…

Perhaps that sounds overly sentimental for someone who spends most of their days with muddy boots and secateurs in hand, but gardening has a way of sharpening your awareness of life. You notice patterns. You notice fragility. Most of all, you realise that every patch of soil is already occupied long before you arrive with your plans for raised beds and tidy borders.

When I first started gardening professionally, I thought the job was mostly about control. Keeping things neat. Solving problems. Removing weeds, pruning growth, reshaping spaces to fit a design. But the longer I’ve worked outdoors, the more I’ve understood that good gardening is less about domination and more about negotiation. Nature rarely responds well to force.

Take slugs, for example. Every gardener has battled them at some point. Entire rows of seedlings can disappear overnight, reduced to ragged stems by morning. Years ago, I would have reached straight for pellets without much thought. These days I pause before doing anything drastic. There are usually other ways: barriers, companion planting, encouraging birds into the garden, even accepting that a small amount of damage is part of sharing the space with other living things.

That doesn’t mean gardening becomes passive. Sometimes plants need removing. Sometimes pests spread disease and action has to be taken. Any gardener who tells you otherwise is probably lucky enough not to have dealt with box blight or vine weevil. But I think there’s value in approaching these moments with a degree of humility rather than entitlement.

The gardens I enjoy most are never the immaculate ones. They’re the places where life is happening everywhere you look. Bees nosing through foxgloves. Blackbirds flipping leaves for insects. Worms tunnelling beneath the soil, quietly improving it in ways no fertiliser ever could. A perfectly sterile garden might photograph well, but it rarely feels alive.

I’ve noticed clients relaxing more when they begin to accept this too. The pressure to maintain a picture-perfect outdoor space can make gardening feel stressful rather than restorative. Yet a slightly chewed leaf, a crooked stem or a patch of clover in the lawn are not signs of failure. They’re signs that the garden is participating in the wider ecosystem around it.

Maybe that’s why I still move worms when I find them. It won’t change the cycle of life, and I know not every creature survives a gardener’s spade forever. But gardening has taught me that care matters, even in small gestures. Especially in small gestures.

After all, if we are lucky, a garden reminds us that we are not separate from nature. We are simply passing through it for a little while, tending what we can before handing it on.