For months, I have been staring out of the window at a new flowerbed wondering what to plant in it. Although it is south-facing, there are some complications: a sunken terrace to the north, slightly sloping ground and, most importantly, a lot of rain in winter (I live in Somerset). The border is hardly a grand projet, but it has reduced me to a state of petrification.
In search of inspiration, I turned to AI for help. The design apps one can peer at over a paywall seem geared towards American plants, planting zones and tastes (which are not mine) and you would have to have a considerable design and horticultural knowhow to get anything above the generic out of them.
Instead, I went to the standard accessible chat tools, putting in as many specifications (weather, orientation, situation — a frost pocket — soil condition) as I could think of into ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Microsoft Copilot to see what they could come up with. Having uploaded photographs of said flowerbed, as if I were joining a dating site, I asked them all to give me planting plans and some sort of visual rendition.
Although they were entertaining to use (Claude was especially polite and encouraging), I had to feed in endless tweaks and corrections — ‘add more spring bulbs/autumn colour/wildlife-friendly plants’, ‘consider the shade cast by the tall plants’, ‘that plant is too tender to survive’ and so on — which gave the lie to there being any underlying horticultural intelligence at play.
To give them their due, they did apologise if I spotted something amiss and adjusted their plan accordingly. All this refining took me quite a lot of time and thought, however.
"It was an elegant reminder of the irreplaceable human ability to read a site — not as a list of conditions, but as a story: where the wind comes from, where the water gathers, which view needs softening and which should be revealed"
It was when it came to suggesting the plants that matters came to a head. In response to my request for a yellow/pink/orange palette, nearly all came up with the same plants. Geum ‘Totally Tangerine’, Helenium ‘Moerheim Beauty’, gaura and salvias appeared frequently with wildly varying recommendations on how many I needed. If I had followed some of the advice, the bed would have ended up as packed as a Chelsea show garden from day one: good for immediate effect, but not realistic. It was up to me to question how much plants would spread and how the bed would look in five years’ time.
When I pushed the bots to be more imaginative, they did suggest some interesting varieties, but not all were suitable (again, more time was required double-checking viability). I kept thinking I could have saved myself a lot of time by consulting books in the first place.
Some sites did dive more deeply, coming up with step-by-step action plans, a list of nearby nurseries and even what to divide in, say, three years’ time. Most disappointing, however, was that not one site could really understand the photographs I had uploaded. As a result, their visual realisations were at best — and here I am being extremely generous — pretty, but vague. At worst, they presented me with a grotesque mixture of Frankenstein plants that no nursery has ever nurtured. I exaggerate not.
The designer Lottie Delamain, whose new book Gardens That Can Change the World is to be published soon, lives conveniently nearby and, although my garden is hardly going to echo her examples, she kindly came to look at my results. ‘It’s not very nuanced,’ she pronounced, immediately observing that all the programmes had come up with the same palette of plants because, clearly, they’re still working from quite a small pool of information. ‘The big thing is that they are simply not understanding that you’re in the bottom of a valley, which you immediately see when you walk in.’
Unforgivably, they had failed to spot the most obvious issues. ‘A designer would clock that all the Mediterranean plants on their lists are going to have very wet feet in winter’ — and consequently rot and die. Nor had any of them taken note of the wider ecological benefits of a good planting plan. ‘They’re not talking about creating structural layers for different habitat types.’ It was an elegant reminder of the irreplaceable human ability to read a site — not as a list of conditions, but as a story: where the wind comes from, where the water gathers, which view needs softening and which should be revealed.
Last time I spoke to the designer Andy Sturgeon, he had been full of doom and gloom about AI taking over and how he would be out of a job. I gave him a call to see if he had enrolled on a plumbing course and found him considerably more cheerful.
‘Clients are simply not interested in using some AI bot to turn out a garden,' he said. 'They don’t want that, which is a good thing.’
Having the deep knowledge of how plants work together beautifully in a particular place is what has led Mr Sturgeon to three Best in Shows at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show and a successful career as one of the country’s top designers.
He does, however, find himself using AI as an ‘ideas generator’. It can be quite useful: ‘When you look at a blank page and think “what am I going to put here?”, every plant name immediately disappears from your head. You could say, for example, “give me a list of shade-tolerant plants” simply to get you started.’
At the rate of development of machine learning, it is not inconceivable that, one day, AI will be able to take everything seen and unseen in the garden into account. For now, however, I think I need the four-dimensional skills and forethought of the garden designer, who is mindful of weather, aspect, soil, seasons, nutritional needs and complementary strengths in choosing every plant to put in the ground.
Gardening still needs someone who understands that even the most formal of gardens is a living thing, which will change with time, and, most importantly, someone with those indefinable, unlearnable qualities of taste and vision.
This feature originally appeared in the print edition of Country Life on April 22, 2026. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.