Spacing - Not an Exact Science

Ever had the experience of having to fill in space between plants? Maybe something died, or you hated it and hauled it out. (If it died, maybe it hated you. I should really write a post on plant suicide sometime.) Or perhaps you're starting from scratch and grappling with those wonderful books where they tell you how big and how wide your plants will get. They usually go on to tell you to map out your new garden on graph paper, using the measurements to figure out how many of each you need.

I don't want to knock the graph-paper method, but the problem is that once you've got the plants in the ground, they tend to have their own ideas about how big (or not) they want to be. There's only so much you can do about that.