The garden giveth... and the garden very much taketh away. 😂

Ree Drummond shared a very funny look back at the past three summers in her garden, beginning with 2024, when the raised beds were absolutely bursting with dahlias and greenery. Then comes 2025: Still lush! Still colorful! Still looking like the sort of place where you might happily disappear for a few hours with a pair of clippers.

And then... summer 2026.

As the sweeping, lovely music in the video suddenly gives way to a hilariously off-key version, Ree pans over what can only be described as the aftermath. Brown plants. Empty-looking beds. And general horticultural despair. Her caption said everything that needed saying: “We’ll get ’em next year.”

The whole thing is especially funny when you remember how deeply Ree fell for gardening again in 2024 after nearly a decade away from the hobby. Dahlias became the particular obsession. “I’m in love. Deep, deep love,” she wrote that summer, explaining that they were so rewarding that “every morning in a dahlia garden is like Christmas.” She was already calculating how many more beds she could squeeze into the yard the following year. Sorry, Ladd!

And for a while, things were going swimmingly. Last summer, Ree joked that she’d discovered the secret to getting her sometimes-finicky dahlias to “pop off” in the garden: leave town and stop hovering over them. “I just need to give them space and they’ll show me what they can do,” she said.

This year apparently had other plans. Back in July, Ree had already admitted it had been a “rough summer” for the dahlias, despite going into the season saying she’d learned from Oklahoma’s weather and was “prepared for anything.” Famous last words, perhaps.

But at least Ree has company! Her comments quickly filled with fellow gardeners reporting similarly grim results. “Humidity and heat squashed the garden of our dreams,” one person wrote. Another offered possibly the finest 2026 garden summary of all: “Three huge gardens and all I have are herbs and a bad attitude.” Someone else asked, “Were you filming my garden or yours?” And our personal favorite: “So much death 😂.”

There’s always next year, friends!