Garden Diaries: ‘You Have to Let Go of Perfection’ – How Eric and Christopher Feml-Nelsen Transformed an Ordinary Suburban Yard Into a Romantic Cottage Garden

When Eric and Christopher Feml-Nelsen, better known online as Grow For Me Gardening, first arrived at their empty, new-construction plot in Upstate New York, they dreamed of creating a contemporary, English-inspired cottage garden. Novices at the time, they began transforming their suburban yard, not yet realizing how much the process would teach them.

In just eight years of experimenting and growing plants for the first time, the pair have curated an abundant garden that feels remarkably established. Hundreds of hydrangeas and roses spill across curving borders, while winding paths create secluded corners to pause in. For Eric and Christopher, it is far more than the backdrop to their home – it’s a private retreat, somewhere to reconnect with nature and nurture a growing obsession with plants.

The self-taught gardeners have documented every stage of building their garden from the ground up on social media, where they are now followed by thousands of aspiring gardeners. In sharing their successes, failures, and learnings, they inspire other beginners by showing you don’t have to be a professional to achieve a beautiful, richly planted garden. They say their biggest lesson has been to embrace the unpredictability of plants: ‘You have to let go of perfection and just enjoy the process.’

There Was Nothing Here

Our home was newly built in 2018, so there really wasn’t a garden – just an empty half-acre sandy plot with a handful of ornamental trees and shrubs.

The interior of our home was beautifully designed to our taste, but walking outside to nothing felt uninspiring. We were eager to get to work and transform it into a dreamy garden with romantic planting.

The only problem was that we weren't gardeners by profession or hobby, working in full-time jobs while trying to pull this garden together without really knowing what we were doing.

Our starting point was to take some photos, go to a garden center, and ask the staff what to do to make it better. We then dove headfirst into educating ourselves by researching online and in magazines. It didn't take long for us to become obsessed with TV shows like BBC’s Gardeners’ World.

Suddenly gardening felt like more than a hobby, it became a newfound passion that fuelled our creativity and opened our hearts to plants for the very first time.

We began by planting perennials we liked the look of, gradually carving out borders to soften the rectangular shape of the yard and give it more personality.

In the early stages, we took weekly trips to nurseries and garden centers. They always have plants that are looking their best in the moment, as well as what’s just about to bloom, so it gives you an idea what works seasonally.

But, this was only the beginning. We soon realized patience is fundamental when designing a garden from scratch.

It was then around 2020 that we decided to document this journey, using Instagram as a digital journal just for fun. What we didn't necessarily anticipate was how many other beginner gardeners would relate to us and wanted to hear the tips we had learned and even take inspiration from our garden. That's how Grow For Me Gardening was born.

Head Over Heels For Hydrangeas

We take a lot of our inspiration from English-style gardens, so it was inevitable that our first love would be hydrangeas.

We now have around 215 in total, a mix of varieties across the five main types grown in North America: oakleaf, smooth, panicle, bigleaf, and mountain.

The panicles were actually some of the first plants we introduced. Our yard lacked privacy, so we used 15 shrubs to create a hydrangea hedge for screening.

As soon as we saw those cone-shaped flowers, we knew we needed more varieties to fill our borders.

Now, hydrangeas are planted across the garden in groups of three and five for impact, creating layers of texture, color, and different flower silhouettes.

We’ve always loved blue hydrangeas, but they're so difficult to grow here. Our soil is fairly neutral, while they prefer acidic conditions, but we of course covet what we can't have.

However, we do grow a lot of Proven Winners hydrangeas (which are available at Nature Hills) because they have some incredible varieties for remontant flowering.

The ability for bigleaf hydrangeas to flower on new wood has been game-changing in particular. Our cold winters cause buds to freeze, but these reblooming varieties allow for a display later in the season.

It's been a joy to discover plants like this because it's made it possible for us to grow showy shrubs that would otherwise struggle in our climate.

Now we're constantly looking for more. It's like a challenge to add the most unique hydrangeas to our collection and prove that we can grow them.

Finding Seasonal Rhythm

Our growing season is really from May to October and we’ve learned to make the most of those months.

We focused on creating continual interest, so our space looks a little bit different every week. You can’t just plant things that look good in spring or you’ll end up with nothing through summer.

With that being said, the biggest spring highlight is our giant snowball viburnum at the back of the garden. We’ve pruned it into a multi-stem tree that fills out with perfectly round blooms.

And right now, many summer bulbs are waking up, with lots of alliums beginning to emerge.

But as the garden has matured, the real jewel of summer has become our collection of David Austin roses. We’ve just planted ‘Dannahue’, which was only released in the US last year, so it will be exciting to see the blooms in person and bury our noses in the fragrance.

The apricot ‘Lady of Shalott’ and the blousy pink ‘The Ancient Mariner’ have also both done very well for us, bringing a softness to the planting.

We really love adding unique plants to the garden that spark conversation. The one plant our community of followers always ask about is ‘Kintzley’s Ghost’, a North American native honeysuckle.

You wouldn’t immediately recognise it as a honeysuckle. It has silver rounded bracts that look almost like eucalyptus on a vine. It has small yellow flowers that turn into red berries in fall, which the birds love.

We planted it as a small quart-sized plant and within a few years it filled an entire section of the fence. It's been such a reliable addition and taught us to just try new things and see what works.

The importance of evergreens in the yard becomes much clearer every time winter arrives. Our growing season is short, but these structural plants provide interest all year.

One of the most striking is ‘Troemner’ blue spruce which brightens the winter garden landscape. We’re also adding more golden evergreens this season, mixing different heights and textures so there’s depth even when all the summer blooms have faded.

These evergreens don’t just carry the garden through winter, they also provide some grounding in the busier months. It's somewhere for the eye to rest among the overwhelming color and movement of spring and summer planting.

Adapting As We Grow

We’re not perfect gardeners and have certainly faced some challenges along the way.

One of the struggles we’ve had with smooth hydrangeas is slugs nibbling at the base of the stems, which then weakens them and causes the stems to fall over.

We’ve also dealt with leaftier caterpillars, which take two hydrangea leaves and wrap them around the flower bud to create a pouch. They sit inside and eat the flower bud and foliage, but we've found the natural pest control method is peeling open those leaves and flicking them away.

Both of us actually still work in full-time employment alongside social media, so there are also some techniques we use to make the garden easier to manage.

Drip irrigation provides supplemental water on a timer, while we layer plants densely and let self-seeding flowers do a lot of the work to suppress weeds. The purple top verbena is one of our favorites – it happily seeds itself around the garden and fills in gaps naturally with bright pops of color.

As for feeding the garden, we source compost locally and use it for mulching.

All of these things not only help the garden look better and healthier, but also take away some of the more laborious tasks, which means we can actually enjoy living in the space and not just spend every spare hour in our busy schedules tending to it.

The Garden Takes the Lead

Over the last eight years here, we've achieved so much, but we're far from done. The garden is never truly finished, and truthfully, we like to push and challenge ourselves to do even more.

In many ways, we’ve learned to relinquish control. You can't always predict what nature will do and there’s something quite freeing in accepting that. In fact, it's joyful to see how the garden changes each year, even when it doesn't quite go to plan.

When we first started gardening, the smallest things being out of place would feel stressful. If rose petals had fallen, we’d be straight out there clearing them up.

Now, we’re far more relaxed.

We let the garden do its thing, just guiding it where needed, and not holding onto perfection. We embrace the hurdles and changes, and allow the garden to shape us into better gardeners.

You can follow along Eric and Christopher's gardening journey on Instagram and YouTube @growformegardening, where they share regular updates.

Garden Diaries is our series where we share inspiring stories of designing and cultivating a stunning garden space. We explore how creatives, designers and tastemakers have grown a deeply personal space, inviting creativity, learning and happiness in their gardens, and how they live in these spaces.

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