Gardens are full of death. Things wilt, things rot, things in the compost heap start to smell dubious. Sometimes they are animal: dead rats, dead pigeons, once even a cat’s head, dug up, bodyless, from some other garden grave by an over-zealous spaniel. Mostly, though, the deaths are vegetable, spilling yellow fluid from sores, dropping dried-up leaves in scores, or just slowly fading away, browning.

When you start to garden, you go through a first phase where you are very afraid of being responsible for death. Having been told pretty much from the word go in life that killing things is wrong, you feel the exhilaration of having living things under your charge, and at the same time the profound injunction not to kill them. Killing living things that you have been given seems particularly bad. Gifts of herbs from a friendly neighbour, a housewarming present from a well-meaning mother: these deaths sit in your soul starkly, failing to properly decompose. Each death seems a personal vote of no confidence in you as a human being whose ancestry bears no apparent traces of a presumably agricultural past. Maybe your genes are pure hunter-gatherer?

Yet even a brief investigation of the world of professional horticulture reveals that amongst the paid experts, killing some stuff now and again, or even often, is apparently nothing to worry about. Posh gardeners like Vita Sackville-West and Christopher Lloyd were especially unworried about killing things. It’s hard to resist speculating that it was their sense of aristocratic entitlement that stopped them worrying about the annual massacre of innocents, but actually your local parks department, populated by non-landed gentry, takes exactly the same view. They’re just plants, goes the received version. Plant tulips for spring bedding, let them flower, dig them up and throw them away. No matter that these are perennial bulbs, which could in theory come back year after year if planted in the right spot and looked after properly. It’s not worth the effort. And the cost. Just buy them again next year.

Professional gardeners also have a strong sense of permission when it comes to taking out plants that have got too big. Chopping out unwieldy magnolias or unrewarding witch hazels is par for the course as far as they are concerned; these plants aren’t achieving what they were supposed to, so get them out. The fact that the plant is only growing there to begin with on human orders doesn’t factor into the equation. Death is normal. The wood chippings will make a lovely mulch.

Yet the gardener’s dance with death is an elaborate one. Listening to a recording of Niall Fergusson’s The Ascent of Money (a right-wing meditation on the history of capitalism) while gardening, prompts a set of thoughts about the nature of speculation and risk. Twenty-first century gardeners in the UK have been fed an enormous quantity of persuasive prose over the last eight years about climate change. So there we all were, changing our strategy, investing in Mediterranean beauties like Nerium oleander, fragrant and heat-seeking. Oleander would die in a hard frost, of course; but then hard frosts were a thing of the past, weren’t they, like boom and bust economics?

But it turns out that neither hard frosts nor bank runs have quite been left behind in the good old 1900s. In Niall Fergusson’s tough-love scenario, boom and bust results from human nature being far too prone to exhilarated excitement, alternating with drastic panic. So stock market movements can’t be predicted using normal bell curves of human behaviour – when it comes to money, we are too extreme in our actions. We can’t help it: we are just a stampeding bunch of frightened cows when it comes to thinking we are about to lose our life savings. 

Looking out the window now I’m wondering if we are too extreme in other ways too. We live in a honeyed moment of summer, imagining the rest of our lives will be like this, not even able to remember what winter feels like, looks like. Reading about a Cornish aeonium specialist in the Guardian who had lost every one of their hundreds of specimen plants to frost and snow in the last month, I found myself thinking: “How could you possibly not have considered this possibility? Don’t you have greenhouses? And where, for that matter, was your bubble wrap?”

Death should be a fear. Winter should be a fear. The stock market crashing should be a fear. But they should be fears that are present all the time, not just in the two hours after we hear on the radio that trouble is imminent (financial or meteorological). Diversify your investments, says Niall Fergusson, which I translate as “don’t just grow succulents originating from frost-free South Africa.” More than this, I’d argue, taking the lesson from the thwarted bankers of the City, you can’t do something really well unless you are taking responsibility for the death of it, as well as the life. The only institutions to come out of the current financial crisis well were those who understood their grave responsibility for the money they held. Those who lost the most were those who felt no responsibility at all, who failed to take seriously the possibility of complete meltdown, who behaved like there was no death.

So if you must invest, in property or plants, understand the nature of the bargain. Don’t blame the soil, the climate, or worst of all, the plant. Not because of some abstract ethical stance, but simply because failing to accept the reality of the world will eventually lead to the making of bad decisions. And because being responsible for the life of other living things is something to be relished, not tossed away. Death has dominion here in the garden; yet fending it away is within your power. Take no notice of the posh dead white gardeners or the parks department. If your plants die, you are always responsible.