Why I’m Quiet Quitting My Garden

I always loved gardening. As a kid from St. James Town, a Toronto high-rise neighbourhood, I loved summer weekends at my grandparents’ bungalow near Chinatown. They had a cute front yard I tended. Lopping the hedges, digging holes to edge the lawn’s border with impatiens and planting strawberry seedlings upside down (oops) are among my favourite middle-school memories.

Fast forward to my grown-up life in a midtown-west Edwardian house in Toronto where I garden every spring and summer. Now, I don’t plant seedlings upside down. But I did spend $80 on organic tomato seedlings and stakes, only to yield about $8 worth of tomatoes, most of which were half-eaten by squirrels. I also killed a bunch of expensive hostas when I tried to transplant them from my grandparents’ yard to mine. My front and backyards look tidy—but the plants and lawn look sparse and withered. So, after 15 years, I am quiet quitting my garden.

Quiet quitting—coined by engineer Zaid Khan in a now infamous TikTok video—is, at its essence, about quitting the idea of going above and beyond at work. Seeing how my garden is nothing but work, I felt this on a cellular level.

Gardening has become drudgery with a helping of futility sprinkled on top. I’m done spending $400 a year on improving my shady, grassy-weedy backyard and postage-stamp front yard. Despite all the Saturday mornings—about three to four hours weekly early in the season—and money I pour into them, my yards still look patchy and dusty at best. This year on, I plan to rewild my lawn, encourage native plants and kick back with mimosas instead. But is simply stepping back enough? Or should I be planting seeds, buying seedlings or actively killing off the lawn?

On my quest to quiet quit, I turn to my friend Tara Nolan, author of Gardening Your Front Yard and a co-owner of SavvyGardening.com. She’s been to my house and has seen my typical urban front yard (grass mixed with lily-of-the-valley ground cover, three-storey oak tree) and backyard (more grass, struggling peonies).

Nolan says my indiscriminate use of soil is the main reason my garden is riding the struggle bus. Every year, I splurge on one of those huge bags of topsoil that gets offloaded from a flatbed truck, but this strategy isn’t working. The topsoil just dries up and blows away, or washes away in the rain; it also doesn’t have the nutrients my yard needs.

“Add compost to your front lawn each spring or fall, and consider adding mulch—I use shredded cedar—under the tree,” Nolan says. Leave about eight to 10 inches bare around the base of the trunk, she adds. “Mulch conserves soil moisture and keeps the dust down,” she says.

“Not to disturb your mimosa time,” she adds—at which point I briefly reconsider the future of our friendship—“but lily-of-the-valley is considered to be invasive in Ontario, so I would consider replacing it with another plant.” Invasive plants crowd out native plants and undermine a region’s biodiversity, so the best thing for me to do is pull it all out (again, it’s a struggle-garden so there’s not that much of it) and add new plantings. The Grow Me Instead pamphlet from the Ontario Invasive Plant Council provides native plant alternatives, and the alternative recommendation for lily-of-the-valley is Starry Solomon's Seal. “There are lots of great options that are drought and heat tolerant.” Once I do this, I’ll be on my way to a low-maintenance front yard.

The backyard presents a fresh dilemma. I’m torn about the lawn. My son, a teen, doesn’t dribble a soccer ball out back anymore, so it’s a lot of maintenance and no one really walks on it. Lawns can serve a purpose though; as Nolan notes in her book, Gardening your Front Yard, they can work to control soil erosion, trap pollution and absorb and sequester carbon, as well as reduce noise pollution. Both pollution and noise pollution are genuine concerns, as I live near a noisy laneway, adjacent to a busy major street.

And with this, Nolan comes up with the ideal lazy gardener’s solution: overseeding my lawn with eco-friendly fescues–a cool-weather perennial grass which requires less water and mowing than traditional grass. (She recommends the brand Eco-Lawn).

I ask her if I’m the only one fed up with traditional manicured gardening. “I don't think you're lazy at all,” she says. Perceptions of what a “perfect” lawn and garden should be are shifting, with more gardeners focusing on the benefits of native plants and rewilding spaces.

Part of my $400 yearly outlay goes to shade-tolerant flowers for my borders, like double impatiens, begonias and astilbes. I’m in gardening Zone 6, and part of the Carolinian zone that spreads into the southern U.S. I’m eager to find low-maintenance native plants but, embarrassingly, my knowledge of them is nil.

Alas, my plant ignorance is common. “Up until recently, native plants have often been categorized as weeds or undesirable in a garden, so our familiarity with them is low,” says Jennifer Nantais, naturalist and Program Specialist at Carolinian Canada, a charitable network dedicated to preserving the zone’s biodiversity. “The vast majority of plants sold are non-native, so gardeners don’t have the experience of seeing a diversity of native plants in urban gardens.”

To my relief, I find out that native plants will mesh with my low-effort gardening aspirations and can flourish despite the shade. “Native plants will thrive in different yard conditions. They evolved to grow in your area and can survive in partial sun,” Nantais says. She suggests Canada anemone, wild columbine and woodland sunflower, and shrubs like spicebush and buttonbush.

Best of all, these low-effort native plants will also attract birds and pollinators. Butterfly and swamp milkweed will attract monarchs, while wild geranium, tall ironweed, Joe Pye weed, wild bergamot and Virginia mountain mint will add colour and variety. “Many pollinators rely on the flowers of native trees and shrubs that thrive in every natural habitat—sunny, shady or wet,” Nantais says. If it’s more visits from feathered friends I’m after, in Zone 6, I can look to plant pretty flowers like the petite-bloomed prickly wild rose or smooth aster, among many others listed on the Bird Gardens site.

Though I can’t retire my gardening gloves quite yet, as I have compost to shovel, lily of the valley to remove and new plants to acquire, my quiet-quitting goals are still within reach. I’m buying Carolinian Canada’s Healing Garden native plant kits and I’ve discovered an Ontario nursery called Onplants where I can get native seedlings delivered. After these are in place, by midsummer I hope that my only decision will be whether I want to mix Prosecco or Cava with my fresh-squeezed OJ mimosa.