What gardening taught me about design

I didn't appreciate gardening for a long time. It's tedious, repetitive, and unforgiving. You put in the work and it looks exactly the same as yesterday. You skip a week and it shows. Sometimes you do everything right and something still dies.

Then I read Kenya Hara, and came across his writing on Japanese gardens. The raked pebble stones, the clipped moss, the obsessive evenness of it — none of that is accidental, and none of it stays that way on its own. It looks effortless because someone decided the effort was worth it, consistently, over a long time. That's not a small thing. Most people won't do it. That's exactly why it's unique.

Hara's argument for simplicity isn't really about aesthetics. It's about what it costs to maintain clarity. Filling a surface is easy. Holding it clean over time — against entropy, against the instinct to add — that takes something different.

I've thought about this a lot as I've grown as a designer. The work that gets celebrated is almost always the creation: the launch, the redesign, the visible intervention. But some of the most meaningful design work runs in the opposite direction. The feature that got cut. The screen that got simpler. The work that isn't major or portfolio-worthy but quietly grows with the product.

That work is invisible when it's done right. Like a well-kept garden — you don't notice the effort. You just notice that everything looks right, and you're not sure why.