A useful garden plan leaves room for the gardener’s ordinary week.

Plans are usually made on a good day, in the mood of a free Saturday, and they quietly assume a version of you with more time than you have. The garden then arrives with its own schedule: watering that cannot slip, seedlings that need attention on a Tuesday evening in April. When the plan and the week collide, it is the plan that was wrong, though it rarely feels that way.

Design for the amount of time you actually have most weeks, not the best ones. Choose fewer beds, tougher plants, a shorter watering run. A modest garden you keep up with gives more pleasure than an ambitious one.