A gardening metaphor
As a gardener, you’re never really starting from nothing. You have soil, you have climate, shade, pollinators, and seeds blown on the wind. These are constraints, risks and opportunities.
You can design ahead on paper how you want your garden to be. And you should make decisions based on how you plan to use your garden, the different flowering seasons, the conditions particular plants need to flourish, the space available, and your capability as a gardener.
But how it ends up looking will be different to the plan on your piece of paper. Maybe you plant a shrub and find that the drainage isn’t good enough for it and it doesn’t grow well. Or a flower you’d planted near the back of a border is too short to be seen behind its neighbours. You might discover that the ground is too stony - and so you need to do significant groundwork, sifting stones and adding soil, before your plants will thrive. You create your plan based on what you know and what you reckon - but learning through experience, through interaction with your garden, is the only real way to know what will work.
Every time you add something - you’re running a little experiment, to see if your assumptions stack up.
Your garden is never really done. You could invest a lot of effort upfront - when we moved in my husband and I got rid of the rotting garden shed, replaced fences, dug up a hidden Anderson shelter that was stopping things growing, laid some new turf and neatened up our borders. But the garden wasn’t finished.
There’s a lot of maintenance needed. Regularly the borders need weeding, the lawn needs moving. And with the seasons you’re planting, pruning, feeding, watering, deadheading, dealing with bugs, raking leaves, cutting back.
Beyond that, you need to adjust your garden to thrive in a changing environment and climate. A series of dry summers that reveal your initial choices aren’t hardy enough to survive a hosepipe ban. Or late frosts that keep killing off spring flowers, or keep the bees sleeping when they need to be out pollinating the blossoming fruit trees.
And the people who enjoy your garden might have changing needs. A couple has children and needs space for play equipment. A family gets a dog and needs to remove toxic plants. A gardener decides to start composting food waste. Or builds a greenhouse and a vegetable patch so they grow their own food. A budding cook decides one year to keep the brambles so they can make jam in the Autumn.
In summary
You don’t start from scratch.
Even if you have a big investment of effort at the start, what you plan won’t be what you get.
You can’t possibly know for sure what will work where until you try it.
And you’re never really done.
It needs regular tending and maintenance to keep it in good enough shape for you to enjoy it as you want.
And you need to invest more substantial effort to keep enjoying it over the long-term - responding to environmental changes and your own evolving needs and preferences.
The analogy for your services shouldn’t be building a house, but establishing and maturing a garden.