There’s a strip of garden that runs along the side of my house, right next to the back door. You pass it every single time you go outside. Which means I have seen it approximately ten thousand times this season, and every single time I have thought: I really need to deal with that. Multiply that by the times my husband has seen it and said to me, “you really need to deal with that.”

I didn’t deal with it.

Because April arrived, and while I was busy planning what to do with this garden, I started shopping for dahlias. Then I started some petunia, pansy, celosia, moonflower, and dahlia seeds inside under grow lights. And I had to wake up the tubers. Then May came and suddenly all those tubers  and seedlings needed homes. Plus, I caught a bad case of dahlia fever and I ordered more tubers, because future me would definitely want them. By June, the side garden had taken on a life of its own, and I could no longer pretend I was in charge of it.

I decided to respect that.

The thing is, I really did have a plan for that garden. I was going to clear it out, amend the soil, thin out the lillies and the evening primrose, and put in some structure, a little border edging, some dwarf snapdragons, some celosia, all thoughtfully arranged into the kind of thing that looks like it was created by a person who has their life together.

Instead it looks like a person who has 35 dahlias, a full-time job, a blog, grandkids who showed up on Saturday wanting to do literally everything except let me go outside and weed, and a serious inability to say no to one more tuber order.

So this little side garden got none of my attention and all of my guilt.

Until recently, when I walked past it on the way to check on my dahlias and something in my brain quietly said: this is fine.

Not fine like a consolation prize. Not fine like it is anything but fine. Fine, like, actually, genuinely fine. The garden is alive. Things are growing in there, even if some of them are uninvited. The lillies are contained. Ish. The primroses I planted years ago are thriving. The yarrow I don’t ever remember planting at all is quite frankly a mystery and at this point I’m curious enough to let it stay.

It’s not pretty. It’s not the garden I planned. But it’s the garden I have, and I was out there in my dahlia tee at 7am with my coffee watching a bee happily enjoying the fruits of my neglect, and I thought, I’m not sure this needs to be fixed.

Here’s what I know about myself as: I will always have more enthusiasm than time. I will always plant more than I can manage. I will always have a list of things I meant to do that got quietly overtaken by the shiny new flowers or plants I want to add. And the things I actually did this season — 35 dahlias, more plants than I know what to do with, a whole education in staking and feeding and watching and waiting, those things were worth every unweeded corner of the side garden.

The perfect gardens are somewhere out there on Pinterest. Mine has grass growing where it shouldn’t, borders that gave up years ago, and a patch in the far corner of our small suburban quarter-acre lot that we have affectionately dubbed the “back forty,”  that I am choosing to call “naturalized” rather than “neglected.”

But it also has dahlias. And grandkids running through it without caring if the weeds are pulled or the stakes are straight. And me, first thing in the mornng, walking it, checking on my dahlias and wondering how I got so lucky.

I think that counts for something.

Maybe the goal was never a perfect garden. Maybe the goal was always just a garden. Something alive and growing and mine, even if it’s messy, even if it doesn’t follow the plan, even when it looks like it’s making its own decisions.

I’m no longer apologizing for my ugly garden. It’s doing its best, and honestly, so am I.

How about you? If you’re a fellow imperfect gardener, welcome. Around here, we believe beautiful gardens don’t have to be perfect, and neither do the people growing them.

If you’d like to stick around a little longer, you’ll find the Dahlia Fever shop filled with things made for flower lovers, weekend gardeners, and dreamers with dirt under their fingernails.