Years ago, when I lived in Nashville, I belonged to the Middle Tennessee Perennial Plant Society, and I remember best a garden designer named Duncan Caldecott who finished his talk with a reminder I have never forgotten.
“If someone visits your garden and makes fun of you for planting lowly common orange daylilies, you tell them ‘It’s MY garden’.”
Horticultural Ideology is a terrible weed to let into your garden. Let no one tell you what to do in your garden or what you must plant. It is your garden and if you want a peony and iris border you should have it. If you truly want a front lawn of common milkweed, it is a free country. Plant it. Do not let the Plant Puritans who care only for utility and nothing for beauty shame you into plants you do not want just so you and they can feel virtuous and smug. Remember that gardens are for people too, as well as for your pleasure.
The photo above is of marigolds mingling with Downy Goldenrod in the Goffstown Historical Society garden.
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In the years I lived in the South I saw heartbreaking mass destruction as Nashville swallowed up fields of butterfly weed and replaced them with oil change shops and the smell of chicken wings. I have seen the vast fields of soybeans and cotton in the Mississippi Delta punctuated by Cargill signs and insect traps and monster farm machines. The few wild places left were the National Wildlife Refuges and the floodplains on the Mississippi River side of the levees.
Gardening On Granite 