‘I WAS WORKING REALLY HARD, NOT SPENDING ENOUGH TIME DOING WHAT I LOVED’
Dan Cooper, 48, otherwise known as the Frustrated Gardener, left his job in retail to become a full-time garden influencer. Packed with subtropical plants, his tiny, coastal garden in Broadstairs has a cult following and recently featured on Gardeners’ World
I showed a keen interest in plants and flowers from a young age, and even got a greenhouse for my 14th birthday. But after studying landscape management at the University of Reading, I went to work as a landscape architect and found I didn’t enjoy it, so I ended up working in retail. I bought this cottage in Broadstairs in 2006, and in 2012, I had an epiphany. I realised I was working really hard and not spending enough time doing what I loved, tinkering in the garden. Frustrated, I started a blog.
The joy of gardening is to do with unbridled creativity and free rein. There’s no right or wrong – you can do as you please. It’s about self-expression. Over time, I’ve become bolder and more flamboyant and experimental. I have a thing about plants on the edge of hardiness, and the challenge of growing plants that aren’t straightforward. I also love the tropical, exotic aesthetic.
There are two gardens: the jungle garden, and what I’ve dubbed the ginand-tonic garden. The jungle garden is above vaulted cellars, so there’s no soil. It measures 20ft by 30ft and is hollow underneath. My signature as a gardener is “potscaping”, because this garden is all about pots. We’re on the coast and it’s very windy, so I’ve tried to create a sheltered microclimate. If you put your pots close together, they create a microenvironment and need less watering.
I constantly put things in and take things out, with flowers not yet in bloom waiting in the side alley. I also put grit on top of the soil to stop water from evaporating. There are raised beds around the edge, a narrow-leaved bay tree, a fig tree, a cloud-like Japanese green olive tree and an outdoor kitchen for entertaining, unheard of when the garden was created 11 years ago.
I established the gin-and-tonic garden – a 20ft square patch on the other side of the cottage – six years ago, when my partner and I bought the adjoining cottage. It’s less tropical, but more colourful and cottagey, because there’s more sun. There’s no soil, and there’s solid chalk under the paving. We grow everything in pots and there’s a small greenhouse for our seedlings. I also got an allotment in September 2019, where I’m growing 120 varieties of dahlia.
Gardeners instinctively learn from one another, and there’s a vast network online now, sharing their know-how. Not all of them have acres and acres of land, and it’s seen as more accessible.
One of the biggest barriers to people getting into gardening is the fear of failure, but now people can see that gardens don’t need to be perfect or done a certain way. Even chrysanthemums can be cool – they’ve been associated with garage forecourts and funerals, but now they’re shaking that off in new settings. I find Jimi Blake’s garden, Hunting Brook in Ireland, very inspiring. He’s a once-in-a-lifetime genius pushing the boundaries of gardening, like Christopher Lloyd did at Great Dixter. He does zany things, but they look brilliant.