The Myth of Finished

There’s a dream most of us carry in our heads: the landscape around the cottage is settled, complete, resolved. Everything is in its place and there’s nothing left to do but enjoy it.

This picture comes from magazines, from the neighbour’s place, and from a landscaping industry that sells “transformations.” It promises a destination. If you work hard enough or spend enough, you’ll arrive at “done.”

The problem is that done doesn’t exist. And chasing it is costing you money, weekends, and peace of mind.

Landscapes don’t finish, they keep becoming. The “weeds” return. A cleared area fills with raspberries and then saplings. Plants spread or die back. The mulch you installed last year needs replacing. And what looked complete in July looks different by September, and different again next spring.

This isn’t failure, it’s how land works.

When you treat “finished” as the goal, you end up signing up for enforcement duty. Your job becomes holding the picture in place against the landscape that keeps moving. Every weekend is damage control, and every season brings another list of corrections.

This is exhausting here in the Highlands because the land is so insistent. Our short growing seasons concentrate the pressure, and the whole place just wants to turn into forest. You’re not just maintaining a landscape, you’re fighting ecology.

The financial cost is real. You’re replacing plants that don’t survive and amending soil that won’t support what you want. You’re watering through droughts and paying crews to reset what drifted. The bill for holding a landscape in place accumulates year after year, with no end in sight.

Retreats that look like work

The deeper cost is what it does to your weekends. The cottage was supposed to be a retreat and instead it’s become a job site. You arrive, get out of the car, and immediately start scanning for problems.

The pressure you feel looking at the landscaping—that simmering sense that something needs to happen—never resolves because the destination keeps receding. Maybe the goal itself is wrong.
So here’s the alternative: stop trying to finish.

This doesn’t mean neglect, it means shifting from enforcement to participation. Instead of holding a picture in place, you work with what the landscape is already doing. You just guide it, edit it, and respond to it. You plant things suited to the conditions you actually have, and you let some areas go where they want to go.

Landscapes that sustain

The work doesn’t disappear, but it changes because you’re not fighting anymore. Instead, you’re paying attention and adjusting. The land develops over seasons and years—not towards your original picture, but towards something that fits the place and sustains itself.

What you lose is the fantasy of completion, but what you gain is a property that stops feeling like it’s a burden. The neighbours with the finished landscape? Look closer, and they’re either fighting harder than you realized or paying more than you’d guess. Or maybe they quietly made peace with the fact that it’s never actually done. After all, the picture in the magazine was taken on one perfect day after a crew spent hours preparing the shot. The flowers are all blooming, and the evening sun is golden. It’s just a moment in time.

Your landscape will never be finished, so once you stop expecting it to be, something else, becomes possible—a relationship with your property that isn’t a war of attrition.

The land is going to keep changing, so the question is whether you keep fighting that fact or find a way to live with it.