If you want a garden you’re actually going to use, plan it around who you actually are.
Not the Instagram version of yourself you dream about while scrolling online. The real version.
You know—the one who likes a quiet cup of coffee every morning but usually drinks it in bed or sitting on the couch. The one who enjoys a glass of wine at the end of the day. The one who reads after dinner, eats breakfast at the kitchen table, or calls her sister every Sunday afternoon.
Those are the things I would design a garden around.
If you already drink coffee every morning, why not create a beautiful place where you could drink it outside? You don’t have to sit there every day. But on those perfect mornings when the temperature is just right and the garden is especially beautiful, the place is waiting for you.
That’s very different from building an outdoor space around the person you hope you might someday become.
Maybe You Don’t Actually Want to Sit in Your Garden
To be clear, there is nothing inherently better about drinking your coffee outside. If you’re perfectly happy drinking it in bed or curled up on the couch, carry on.
But if you’re someone who looks out the window on a beautiful morning and thinks, I really should spend more time out there, this is for you.
Because sometimes the problem isn’t that we don’t want to be outside. It’s that we’ve never made it as easy or enjoyable to do the things we already love outside as it is to do them inside.
And that is something a garden can change.
Design for the life you already live
I’m as guilty as the next person of seeing a beautiful life on Instagram and imagining myself living it.
Someone is making homemade pizza in an outdoor oven while twelve friends gather around a long table under twinkling lights, and for a moment I think, We should absolutely have an outdoor pizza oven.
Then I snap back to reality.
Am I really going to make pizza outside?
Maybe once.
And if the answer is once, I probably don’t need to design part of my garden around it.
Designing around an aspirational version of ourselves is a bit of a crapshoot. We do this inside our houses, too. We create spaces for things we imagine we’ll do and then wonder why those spaces sit unused.
A garden isn’t much different.
If the goal is to make the garden part of everyday life, I think we have to be realistic about what everyday life actually looks like.
Start with something you already do
Instead of asking, What should I put in my garden?, start with a different question:
What do I already enjoy doing that I might enjoy even more outside?
Maybe it’s coffee.
Maybe you and your husband sit down together with a beer or glass of wine at the end of the day.
Maybe you eat breakfast every morning.
Maybe you read.
Maybe you work from home and would occasionally love to take your laptop outside.
Maybe it’s simply sitting quietly for ten minutes before everyone else wakes up.
Once you know the activity, you can design a place that makes doing it outside easy.
And easy matters.
If you want to drink your morning coffee outside, don’t put your coffee spot at the far end of the garden because that’s where the prettiest view is. Maybe it belongs just outside the kitchen door.
If that spot is already baking in full sun by eight o’clock in the morning, you’ll need shade. That might eventually come from a strategically placed tree, or it could be as simple as an umbrella.
If your ritual happens at the end of the day instead, pay attention to what the garden feels like at five or six o’clock. Where is the sun? Where is it cooler? Do you need lighting as evening arrives? Is there somewhere to put your drink?
The activity begins to tell you what the space needs.
Give yourself a reason to return
I don’t think a patio, deck, or beautiful garden automatically gives us a reason to go outside.
Life does.
The garden simply needs to make room for it.
And the reason doesn’t need to be impressive.
In fact, I suspect the smallest rituals may be the ones that ultimately connect us most deeply to our gardens because they happen again and again.
A cup of coffee outside means noticing that the peonies finally opened.
Breakfast on the patio means hearing the birds you don’t notice through the windows.
An evening drink might keep you outside long enough to notice how different the garden feels when the light begins to fade.
You start experiencing the garden instead of simply looking at it.
And eventually, going outside doesn’t feel like another activity you have to remember to do. It’s simply another place where part of your life happens.
Don’t build for Instagram you
Before you add the next patio, fire pit, outdoor kitchen, dining area, reading nook, or whatever beautiful thing has captured your imagination, ask yourself one question:
Is this for the life I actually live—or the life I like imagining?
There is nothing wrong with aspiration. Gardens themselves are aspirational in many ways. We plant tiny trees imagining the shade they’ll provide years from now. We plant bulbs in fall because we’re already thinking about spring.
But when it comes to how we use our gardens, I think knowing ourselves matters.
So start with one thing you already do.
Your morning coffee. Your evening glass of wine. Breakfast. Reading. Talking with someone you love.
Then give that ordinary part of your life a beautiful place outside.
You may find you don’t need to invent a reason to use your garden after all.
You were already doing it.
You just needed somewhere outside to do it.
