We live surrounded by promises of immediacy. Gardens in three weeks. Flawless lawns in forty-eight hours. Weekend transformations. Then the first dry summer arrives, the first autumn storm, and it all falls apart for what it was: a stage set.

A real garden is not installed. It is sown, observed, corrected. It is left to grow while the roots find their way through the limestone. It takes three winters for a native shrub to settle in, five for a fruit tree to bear without help, a decade for a garden to become what it was always meant to be. That is not a problem. That is the craft.

Soil is not a support structure. It is not the place where you stick a plant so it does not fall over. Soil is a living organism, a network of fungi, bacteria, earthworms and insects that has spent millions of years negotiating a balance. Every cubic centimetre of healthy soil contains more microorganisms than there are people on the planet.

When someone tells us their soil «is no good», the first thing we do is crouch down and smell it. Living soil smells like a forest after rain. Dead soil smells of nothing. Our work always starts there: bringing life back to the ground. Everything else follows.

«Mediterranean» does not mean «from here». There is enormous confusion: people plant olive trees from Jaen, lavender from Provence, bougainvillea from Brazil, and call it a Mediterranean garden. But Mallorca is not Provence and it is not Andalusia. Mallorca is limestone, xaloc wind, red earth, occasional frosts in February and four-month droughts.

The plants that work here are the ones that have spent centuries learning to live here: the wild olive, the rockrose, the lentisk, the mastic, the creeping rosemary, the dwarf palm. These are plants that need no one to water them because they have already negotiated their pact with this land. Planting native is not an aesthetic choice. It is an intelligent one.

In Mallorca, every litre of water is a design decision. The aquifer reserves drop every year. Desalination uses energy and leaves salt behind. Automatic irrigation gives a false sense of abundance that does not exist. Designing a garden without thinking about water is like building a house without thinking about the foundations.

That is why we think about water before we think about the plant. Where the runoff goes. How to retain rainfall in the terrain. Which surfaces absorb, which repel. Mulching, infiltration swales, drip irrigation only where strictly necessary. A garden well designed for drought does not look dry. It looks like it belongs.

We do not reject synthetic chemicals out of ideology. We reject them because they do not work. A herbicide removes the offending plant, yes, but it also kills the soil microfauna that kept it in check. An insecticide eliminates the pest, but also the natural predators that controlled it. Every chemical intervention creates a new dependency. It is a cycle that can only be broken by stepping out of it.

We work with compost, with cover crops, with natural preparations, with patience. It is slower. It is less spectacular. But after two years the difference is clear: a garden treated with chemicals needs ever more chemicals. A garden treated with biology needs ever less intervention.

Some companies send four workers with a leaf blower, an electric hedge trimmer, and they leave in two hours. They leave the garden «clean». They also leave the soil compacted, the hedges stressed and the bird nests in the skip. That is not gardening. That is facade maintenance.

We prune by hand, with shears. We observe each plant before touching it. We know which branches to remove and which to leave because we have spent years watching how each species grows in this specific climate. We take longer. We charge for knowing, not for cutting. And the result shows: a garden cared for by a craftsman is as different from one maintained by a crew as a handmade piece of furniture is from a factory one.

The marges —the dry stone walls that shape the Mallorcan landscape— are not decoration. They are engineering. Generations of pagesos stacked stone without mortar to create terraces that hold the soil, channel water, regulate temperature and shelter lizards, insects and plants that grow nowhere else.

Every marge that collapses and is not rebuilt is knowledge lost. We do not merely respect them: we integrate them into every project for what they are, the backbone of this island's landscape. Working in Mallorca without understanding els marges is like writing without knowing grammar.