May I ask you about how your garden is planned?

We just worked with what we had and our garden has been a mess of this and that for decades. This year I've finally started some rearrangements in order to make it look nicer, I'm using a gardenbox 3d planning tool to build a model and move things around. It won't be fancy given the budget, but I just hope for a better look than before.

Lots of areas have horticulture clubs that you can join for a small fee and get lots of advice from seasoned gardeners. They also sell small plants. Might be worth thinking about.

I remember Gardeners' Question Time on the radio and they visited here for a recording of the programme. Bob Flowerdew answered my question about a small tree in our garden 🙂

There was a brilliant TV series a few years ago presented by Gay Search called “Gardening From Scratch

Heavens! That’s a blast from the past! I remember Gay from Gardeners’ World during Geoff Hamilton’s time as presenter - along with Pippa Greenwood and Bob Flowerdew. I think I have her Front Gardens book lurking somewhere.

I’ve never had a front garden but I remember snapping it up on a market stall where I was always on the prowl. 😂

We started with lists of things we did and did not want/like. (The no goes included lots of things from 'a lawn' to crimson flowers). Then you have shape, access, aspect, laundry/bins etc - the practical constraints. How fit are you? How much time and money is available? Then books/magazines/web. You may by this time have worked out a scheme - but if like us you cannot jump from notes to plants - you are now ready to talk to designers. First talk is free, but you will (and should) pay for professional expertise and purchasing of just 'the right' plants.

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It’s good fun working with what you already have. I’m just coming up to four years in my garden.
One of the first things I noticed was that the prevailing coastal wind blew a small apple tree and an overgrown forsythia together which created an archway. I cashed in on that by pruning them to shape and adding a focal point by hanging a mirror on the fence. It’s really easy to keep it all in shape.

There was a dead Callistemon shrub so I stripped it down to the bare bones and painted it charcoal. This year I’ve started to grow the climbing rose, Blush Noisette, in a large pot with the idea of training it up the ‘Witchy Tree’ as the grandchildren call it.
I should point out that all my grandchildren are now in their twenties! 😂

I do not know if this garden was planned in 1927 when the house was built. It probably was, but that is the last time anyone has done any planning.

As far as I can see things have just grown since then.
In or around 1927 someone planted two apple trees and a pear tree. At some point black and red currant bushes were added

In 2016 when we bought the house I added a couple of gooseberry bushes, a strawberry bed and various herbs.

For a few years I had a potato patch also, but digging is now too much for me, so I have let it go back to grass.

Last year a neighbour kindly pruned my fruit trees, cut down the rotten half of the laburnum, of an elderberry and cut back my pine trees. Last Sunday he cut my hedges.

I cut the grass, weed the front path and leave the rest to do as it pleases. Gardening is too much like hard work IMO.

Leaving the garden to itself may not look very nice, but it increases the insect and bird life, plus gives the hedgehogs somewhere to spend the winter, which to me is far more important than wearing myself out keeping a garden spick and span.

I second that on Japanese anemones. Beautiful though they are, eight years on and they still pop up in unexpected places

I'd have a walk around your area, particularly those properties which face the same way as yours. That way you can see what thrives and what doesn't. Also you may happen upon neighbours working in the garden who are only to happy to have a chat -and maybe even offer a few cuttings or spare plants-

Be warned, though, PilgrimQuill, Japanese Anemones are thugs and can soon take over a border!

How about going to every single Open Gardens village or community where you can this summer, and see what ideas you can glean from what other folks have done. I've seen paths cut through wild bits to make a short walkway and reduce the mowing (we've got one of those); large stones on flower beds to reduce weeds (about to do this) and Japanese anemones grown with roses for a lovely casual effect (hasn't worked for me but I did try)...

There was a brilliant TV series a few years ago presented by Gay Search called “Gardening From Scratch”. I wanted to redesign our very nondescript garden and was inspired when one of the episodes featured a house with an identical layout to ours! I bought the accompanying book and copied every detail of the garden including the number and position of the paving stones. When the series was repeated on Freeview my neighbour thought they had copied our garden! www.google.com/gasearch?q=gardening%20from%20scratch&source=sh/x/gs/m2/5

I gathered a lot of ideas from Pinterest and also from YouTube.

My starter house was a Victorian terrace with tiny backyard and so all these ideas were building up in my head for literally decades as to what to do with my garden - when I eventually managed to get the "detached house with garden in a reasonable area" I'd been waiting years for.

So I had a huge "pile" of Pinterest clips that interested me. I got garden magazines (but they tend to feature a totally different style to what I like - so I guess they were more useful for finding out what I don't want.....).

I watched tv gardening programmes.

Basically I'd already made up my mind on what my "style" would be years before I got a garden. I knew I most certainly didnt want the "loadsa tarmac and/or concrete easy maintenance" gardens that there are so many of here and this house had that when I bought it. So the friend that drove me over to Wales to move here knew me well enough that he'd spotted and grabbed a nearby "professional" gardener before I'd even finished moving my belongings in LOL.

I paid that "professional" gardener to rip up literally everything that was there in the soil part of the "concrete garden" the house came with and had to replace some of the earth in order to give myself a blank slate to work with.

I knew already that I wanted a permaculture style garden with perennial type food plants as a base and I'd add some annual food plants as well. The main fruit trees and bushes went in pretty much immediately - as I knew they'd take literally years to fully establish themselves properly and look mature.

I've been experimenting my way through plants ever since - as all my knowledge of gardening was theoretical and I'd never had a chance basically for "hands-on" gardening. I bought this house about 10 years ago bearing firmly in mind "They won't be able to resist starting up some war sometime in my lifetime I estimate - the only question is who they will fight it against and what they will say is the reason for it". So I was basically doing what I would have done several years before World War 2 started-up and getting myself to a safer location and where I'd be able to grow as much food as one can in a typical householders garden. I added extra earth to plant in besides what the house had to start with - and did so by covering a lot of the boring tarmac and paving with nice and huge raised beds to use as the extra "earth" I would have liked.

Now I've just about got my garden finished and with a high degree of "maturity" about it and it looks sorta semi-wild (it's meant to).

I've just put in the last perennial food plants earlier today and it's fully ready pretty much to "run" now.

You can check out the lines I think along by googling for "food forest....permaculture...perennial vegetables" on YouTube channels to get the idea of the route I'm going along personally.

I hate manicured gardens. I have garden all around my home, they are all cottage garden style now, but the largestest garden was left to grass when the boys were young, it was an 80ft long and 30 ft wide patch suitable for rugby, cricket, football etc. I still look after the gardens myself at 84 years of age, but oe of the boys cuts the grass for me.

Yes, ours is what I call an evolved cottage garden albeit with some natural self seeders and others put in by us. We are in a rural area so it suits our environment. Old tree logs have been used as bug houses and we get lots of birdlife in the garden. It’s peaceful, relaxing and just how we like it.

Our garden was planned when we moved in. By the previous people. It was all about show and not enjoyment. It has taken a while but we have softened the edges. Made a vegetable garden, and areas for wildlife. It is much gentler now and more in keeping with our semi rural area.

Beautiful merlotgran

My grandparents planted a great variety of pretty bushes, trees, and bulbs - I've added, keeping what grows well (as I work that out).

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Grouping pots close together can achieve a layered border effect. The Nicotiana in the old milk churn (back left) will grow a lot taller as they are crammed in close together.

We moved from a property with chalk soil to sand. We have found, through trial and error, that roses and peonies, lavender, loves the soil here. Currently, they are all blooming and look amazing. Most of my plants were dug up from the previous house as the new owners were going for all grass and no flower beds. Here, it was all conifers and laurels. We tackled the conifers first and got rid of most. Now we have some lovely borders with shrubs and colour. Most plants we buy are from the sad left overs at the garden centres which perk right up once they’re in the ground with some bonemeal to get them going. My best buy was peonies from Lidl. They are going made in their third year.

I watch loads of makeovers on the YouTube channel Great Home Ideas. They do loads of Great Garden Ideas on there. Even though it's based in Australia, so the plants are often specific to Oz, the design ideas are applicable anywhere. It's quite entertaining too. Worth a look? Make yourself a cuppa, find the channel and click on subscribe. It's free to subscribe on YouTube and you can see all the thumbnails if you press the videos option.

Trouble is with wood, is you have to maintain it every year. We are getting too old, I can’t knee down to paint. I would have liked random stone but way too expensive.

Ahh thank you crossstitchfan. I laughed when I saw what he was doing- but the end result was amazing 😊

Mine just evolved and is still evolving. The times I've gone by the book and planted according to height, colour, season, light, soil etc after a year or two some plants thugs have taken over and those delicate expensive ones have been devoured by slugs or just failed.

I love my garden so much I want to built myself a house on part of it so I can enjoy it even more.

My mother's garden was lawn surrounded by flowering shrubs. It was easy to manage and there was always something of interest. She never grew vegetables apart from a few herbs because they took too much time and apart from asparagus and strawberries, were cheaper in the shops.