I feel guilty when I trash a plant. I know things will look better when I start fresh though. Maybe if you give the plants you don't want to a friend it will make it easier.

Oh yea, me too -- but the comment on the other thread really made sense to me.

My sister volunteers at a historical site, and she's always looking for plants for the garden there, and other family members are going to take some plants off my hands, too, so I should be able to find homes for much of it.

Most of the stuff I have I do enjoy, but again - opportunity to start fresh, especially since I'm losing sun space and gaining shade space, bed space in sunny areas is at a premium over here, and if I don't love it I really shouldn't take up valuable space with it.

The rule of thumb is that a garden is never done.

So, you should definitely go shopping!

Must say I tend to look at a perennial dying, or needing removal, as an opportunity to buy and plant some other perennial.

Of course, I may not know so much about the replacement, but then there's the option of removal -----.

Your garden is always a work in progress, a place to create. It should suit your needs and desires for fulfillment. It's an opportunity to experiment. Go shopping, plant seeds, dig up stuff.

Guilt serves to make you edit your course of action. If you feel guilty, then give the plants away. They'll keep in a shady corner for a few weeks if kept damp.

I felt weird about throwing out seedlings when thinning them. But I got used to it. When I think of all the different plants I've grown over the years that I no longer have, it boggles my mind. But my garden is lovely and I feel good being in it. It's the only creative thing of all my hobbies that I have consistently enjoyed over the last 40 years.

Maybe it is my access to a very wide range of plants through my business but I would never hesitate to remove, toss or otherwise dispose of a plant that didn't thrill me :-) In my old, seriously overplanted garden (one of the "drawbacks" of being in the nursery industry), anything that didn't earn its keep in the garden got yanked. By that I mean, it had to offer more than just a single season of flowers - foliage had to look good when not in flower, it didn't seed or spread excessively, didn't need staking or frequent dividing, didn't have "issues", etc. And because of real estate limitations, if something new came home with me, usually something else had to leave to make room. Leaving a bucket of plants at the end of the driveway with "free" sign on 'em typically does the trick!

I approach things the same with my design clients......frequently folks are reluctant to remove a perfectly good plant even if it doesn't work or is far too large for the spot. I try to reuse them elsewhere whenever possible but sometimes it just makes sense to clear the slate and start over.

Guilty? About what? A cultivated plant is a renewable commodity... just one part of a multi billion (yes, BILLION) dollar per year business.

If you feel guilty about wasting your money on something you don't like, consider it part of the investment in your 'education '. I've done what gardengal suggested (put them on the curb) hundreds of times. I've also chopped plants out, ripped them out of the ground, tilled them under, etc.

What I will NEVER do is be held hostage by plants I don't like or that didn't like me. :-)

I was dividing some dwarf iris earlier this year. I kept about 25%, and was going to toss the rest. A 'friend' said that she would take a lot. I could not give her the junk, but she got about 80% of what I was going to toss. I used to have that gardener's guilt about never, ever tossing anything, but I have learned that there is only so much space in the yard.

That is a difficult thing to learn with most gardeners. Keep the goods and toss the not-so-goods!

Jim

My rock garden was a mess, and I took out the valued plants into pots, killed everything. Bought and arranged as big a sized rocks I could carry and tried to make the rocks look natural. I planted my valued plants back and added others. Never sorry. Still never fail to see faults or things to tweak but it was the best approach. Before, during and after photos are a source of satisfaction, also.
Has always bothered me that people would let sad looking plants hang on and on, when they should be trashed.