I'm entering my third year in this house. I was very well behaved, waited the first year to see what grew (it was autumn when I moved in), just like we're supposed to. The only major changes I made in that first year was to rip out about 20m of leylandii and replace them with a native hedge, and dig a couple of new beds into the lawn. Since then, I'm working around the existing structure developing it further.
When we bought our house in 2018, so many people told us to live in it before making changes. We applied this to both the decoration inside, as well as the garden, to see how we used the space before committing to any plans.
The garden was all lawn - literally no other plants - and so a complete blank canvas. Slowly over the years we've grown into the space and added structure. We started by building the shed. We then put in a new sunny patio which we surrounded by a wildflower border (inspired by the countryside walks we love so much) and built some containers out of spare wood (lockdown project!). Realising I wanted to grow more veg, we then built a raise veg bed in the lawn, and then this year we've built a raised bed to the side which we're planting up this spring (no pics yet).
I've loved the process. Some of it was what I always envisaged, and some (like the veg bed) was more spontaneous. Maybe in hindsight working with a plan would have created a more design-focused garden, but I love that the garden reflects us. It's beautiful as well as being productive (for the bees and me!).
I'd never had a garden of my own before we moved here, and no skills or experience, so it's been a learning curve and one which I have loved.
Garden before
Garden as of last summer (yes that's my cat on a leash, he had his tail removed so we were reintroducing him to the outside post-op!!!)
"If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need"
I lived in mine and slowly changed it over the years - a little each year. I started removing the things I didn't like (rather than focusing on what I did like). It was all one huge learning curve. Now, after decades, there is barely anything left of the original planting and I have the confidence, experience and insight into my own taste to really the build the garden I want. The first years were really experiment. Unfortunately I have gone from a low maintenance set up towards high - from mostly inherited shubs and bushes to beds and climbers, which is a lot more work. I'm now in the phase (and age) where I am now wanting to make it easier work - less pots, annuals, seeds and watering; more perennials, self-seeders and wildy climbers that do their own thing.
It took me until now to be ok taking out mature shubs etc that I didn't like much. It seemed a criminal shame to remove a plant because it is variagated or the leaves are colour not to my taste. It is a waste, no doubt. But giving myself slowly the free reign to design the space is very liberating - realising that the design and colour aspect is really important to me, personally. I noticed there were plants I always tried to keep out of photos. Eventually, those plants were removed. Now the whole thing is pleasing and intensely personal.
When I bought my house in 2007, the back garden was nothing but block paving and decking. I ripped that all out and put down a small patio and lawn. At that point, all I wanted was somewhere for my dog (RIP Tucker) to run around and lay comfortably in the sun. Objective achieved! Didn't stay like it though. I decided I wanted to put some plants in which to start with was a complete disaster. For years I just had a lawn and three unexciting borders but after my mum died, I decided to change things. She'd loved gardening but in the end she just couldn't do anything. I wanted to future-proof it so it'd be easier to maintain as I got older. I put in some raised beds, took out the lawn (no more weekly mowing) and put down some decorative gravel. In hindsight there are some things I wish I'd done differently. I'd have had curved raised beds rather than straight ones so the path through them was winding rather than zig-zag, and I may have arranged them slightly different so I could have put in more trees. C'est la vie! I started with a copper colour scheme and was forever fiddling with the planting. I was completely against shrubs and only wanted perennials. The first summer it was obvious that I'd arranged the planting completely wrong and the year after I had to concede that shrubs were a necessity. Last year I grew annuals for the first time which I was previously against and also had to admit that the small potted purple section on the patio which was a nod to my mum (her favourite colour was purple) just wasn't working. This year, I've changed the colour scheme to white/cream with muted shades and I'm growing container veg on the patio. It's wildly different to what I wanted when I first moved in, but what I wanted changed!
I didn't have a plan for my last garden, so I just started digging borders, put a fence up, then planted the borders up and decided from there. OH came back one day to find a massive hole in the front lawn where I'd decided to put a pond. 😄 The one after was 90ft of gravel, with patchy, ripped up liner underneath. There was an old mattress and freezer etc dumped behind about 50 or so buddleias, and brambles were rife. It was a rental property where we all paid for maintenance, but the garden was ignored, so a neighbour and I cleared the lot, and installed, by hand, a big lawn and a border, a shed and a patio, and charged the maintenance company. We had to have a basic plan to show them. Then I moved, lol! I'm limited here because it's another rental, (another sea of weed-ridden gravel, bindweed and massively overgrown shrubs at first), so I don't want to spend all my hard-earned cash on someone else's property - although I've revamped it all, put a lawn in, built a shed and spent hundreds on plants, any plans are always based on how the garden turns out year to year, just tweaks really.
Our house is old - mid 19c - but the garden seems to date back to the 50s. We're on sand so things just sink (hopefully not the house itself!). We dug up a complete folded up sun lounger that had sunk into the ground. The garden was very overgrown, with ivy all over a fence (that we eventually took down), some lumpy conifers, including a prostrate one that had colonised a huge area - all dug out. Actually enjoyed getting down and doing battle with the roots - coming from a heavy clay garden it was a pleasure. We discovered a little pond a year after we moved in!
The veg patch, where the ivy covered fence used to be!
I had a rough plan for the garden in terms of the layout and hard landscaping but no real planting plan at all. I then kind of created a planting plan for one of the beds and that has just evolved and naturally grown in to the other areas.
Posts
This is the end of July 2022. It's evolving.
February 2021 The first beds I dug.
June 2021
The garden was all lawn - literally no other plants - and so a complete blank canvas. Slowly over the years we've grown into the space and added structure. We started by building the shed. We then put in a new sunny patio which we surrounded by a wildflower border (inspired by the countryside walks we love so much) and built some containers out of spare wood (lockdown project!). Realising I wanted to grow more veg, we then built a raise veg bed in the lawn, and then this year we've built a raised bed to the side which we're planting up this spring (no pics yet).
I've loved the process. Some of it was what I always envisaged, and some (like the veg bed) was more spontaneous. Maybe in hindsight working with a plan would have created a more design-focused garden, but I love that the garden reflects us. It's beautiful as well as being productive (for the bees and me!).
I'd never had a garden of my own before we moved here, and no skills or experience, so it's been a learning curve and one which I have loved.
Garden before
Garden as of last summer (yes that's my cat on a leash, he had his tail removed so we were reintroducing him to the outside post-op!!!)
The one after was 90ft of gravel, with patchy, ripped up liner underneath. There was an old mattress and freezer etc dumped behind about 50 or so buddleias, and brambles were rife. It was a rental property where we all paid for maintenance, but the garden was ignored, so a neighbour and I cleared the lot, and installed, by hand, a big lawn and a border, a shed and a patio, and charged the maintenance company. We had to have a basic plan to show them. Then I moved, lol!
I'm limited here because it's another rental, (another sea of weed-ridden gravel, bindweed and massively overgrown shrubs at first), so I don't want to spend all my hard-earned cash on someone else's property - although I've revamped it all, put a lawn in, built a shed and spent hundreds on plants, any plans are always based on how the garden turns out year to year, just tweaks really.
The veg patch, where the ivy covered fence used to be!