Gardening for Resale

Thinking about doing some work in your garden? Good for you! But, before you head to the garden center and invest in plants, ask yourself a question: who am I doing this for? 

If the answer is "this home’s next buyer," put the shovel down. If the answer is "me," keep going — but manage your expectations when it comes to return on investment. A garden is one of several home investments where ROI is uncertain and largely buyer-dependent.

Growing Up Gardening

I am an avid gardener and have been for as long as I can remember. I grew up spending my summers in Muskoka, marveling at my grandfather's vegetable garden. He took it seriously — rows straight, timing precise, and a real understanding of what the soil needed and when. In his retirement, he worked as a gardener at some large estates, and I often tagged along, helping him plant rows upon rows of petunias and such. Watching him and working with him, I learned early that a garden isn't a project with an end date. It's a relationship that you need to keep showing up for.

That's where my own love of it comes from. Flowers, beds, the whole practice of it is pure therapy for me. I don't garden because I think it'll pay me back. I garden because it's one of few places where my head goes quiet.

So, when I tell clients not to garden for the resale value, I'm not being falsely modest about something I love. I mean it literally: the return on investment is genuinely uncertain, and here's why.

Buyers See Things Differently

First, many buyers see the work – not the beauty. I don't tend to plant anything fussy. I lean into low-maintenance perennials that reward you for years without asking for much. But a buyer who doesn't garden doesn't know the difference between a thoughtfully chosen, hardy border and something that needs daily attention. They just see plants, and plants equal work.

Next, it’s hard to ‘price’ a beautiful garden. A renovated kitchen has a paper trail — receipts, before-and-after photos, a number everyone agrees on. A garden has none of that. Buyers rarely contemplate the years of trial and error, the cost of the plants that didn't make it, the actual labour involved, and so forth. Without a way to price it, most people de-value it.

Not everyone wants the job. Even a genuinely easy garden is still a garden. It needs someone willing to do a bit of weeding, a bit of watching. Plenty of buyers, reasonably, don't want that responsibility — no matter how low-maintenance you've made it.

Rethinking ROI

Here's the thing about ROI as a frame: it tends to work best for one-time events. A kitchen renovation pays you back (hopefully) on the day you sell. A garden pays you back every single day you live with it, for however many years that turns out to be. Measuring years of daily joy against a single closing date is the wrong math from the start.

So my advice, as a REALTOR® who happens to be a gardener: keep your garden, if you love it. Choose plants that suit your life and your soil, not ones you think a future buyer wants to see. Let your front beds do a little quiet work for curb appeal if you like — a tidy border by the front walk genuinely does help a first impression, the same way a fresh coat of paint does. But don't build your backyard around a stranger's hypothetical approval.

Build it around the version of you who's out there most mornings with coffee, soaking it all in and letting it feed your soul. That's the version worth gardening for.