You are here: Tackling a neglected garden

The usual advice is to wait a full year before tackling a garden. See what comes up in spring. Find out what flowers later in the year – the bulbs you did not know were there and the trees you did not know you liked until they blossomed. Discover the places you like to sit, and the views you want to look out on – where you need summer shade, and where you need winter screening. Learn what’s actually there, in short, before you remove any of it.

Top tips for neglected gardens
Top tips for neglected gardens

The people who offer this sort of advice, I suspect, move into houses with nicer gardens than the rest of us. What they call ‘horribly neglected’ we non-gardeners would call ‘slightly tired’. When they move in, they are not confronted with a savannah-like expanse of waist-high grass giving way to a toxic jungle of nettles, while thickets of bindweed sprout from heaps of old brick, concrete and broken glass – the hideous whole hemmed in by strange plants that might once have been a hedge but have now reached monstrous proportions.

No, when you move into a house with a garden like that, you have to start straight away. Sanity demands it.

Clearly, you can’t do everything at once, so prioritise. Tackling the part closest to the house is the obvious choice – but there are cleverer tactics. That overgrown lawn, for instance, can be transformed into a ‘meadow’ simply by mowing a clear strip of path through it. It could lead to a particularly sunny spot, which you would then make the tidiest place in the garden. Or simply work out which window you will spend most time looking out of, and clear what is most visible from it.

Removing rubbish is most people’s first priority. The trick here is to use big, open bags or tarpaulins – anything large enough that it lets you throw rubbish in quickly, and remove it easily later. And always use gloves.

Lawns are rapidly rewarding places to start. Mowing is fast, obviously – but think about tidying up the edges as well. It can be transformative. Even if your grass is thick with clover, daisies, plantains and dandelions, it looks like a ‘lawn’ the moment it is clearly demarcated from a border.

To make a straight edge, lay down a plank and cut along it with a spade. Or use a half-moon edging tool, if you’ve got one; it makes the line slightly neater because its blade is straight, not curved like a spade’s. If you want undulating lawn edges, not straight ones, map them out first with a bit of hosepipe. And you’ve got some hose lying on that rubbish heap already, haven’t you?

A bed full of weeds can be particularly depressing. Applying weed-killer sounds quick and easy, but think: by the time you’ve driven to the garden centre, found your gloves and goggles, cleaned out your sprayer, and measured out the stuff, you could do a lot of hand-pulling. The safety of the big-name weed-killers is looking less and less assured with every passing year, too – not to mention the harm they do to plants and insects.

Flame guns are an alternative. It’s also possible to just strim and strim, gradually killing the weeds with exhaustion. The most effective approach, however, is old-fashioned hand-pulling. It is hard work, but a satisfying work-out. Use a fork to loosen the soil before you pull – otherwise you’ll leave behind the roots and probably hurt your back into the bargain. Consider weeding after rain, too. Most plants come up much more easily when the soil is wet.

If you have really invasive weeds, you will need targeted approaches, and possibly specialist advice. Couch grass, bind-weed and ground elder can seem to come back and back, unkillably, like the Terminator robot. Horse-tail roots can reach seven feet underground. Bamboo can pop up anywhere, especially where you don’t want it. All need informed management.

Once you’ve taken out your weeds, and got back to bare soil it is well worth pausing to make sure you’ve really killed off the culprits. The traditional approach – covering the soil with old carpet – is great if you want your garden filled with plastic fibres and leached flame-retardant chemicals. Waiting for weeds to come up then spraying them is not much better, in terms of chemicals. A clever tactic is to use clear plastic, carefully fixed down around the edges. This raises the soil temperature enough to kill off weeds as they germinate. Summer is the best time to do this ‘solarization’.

When it comes to tackling shrubs and hedges, timing is crucial. If you start hacking in spring, you will disturb any nesting birds; in summer, and you might just promote more bushy growth. Most (but not all) plants respond best to pruning when dormant – plus it is easier to see the underlying shape of them when they are not covered in leaves. So if you can wait till late winter or early spring before you start pruning, do.

If a big plant is clearly in the wrong place, of course, you will need to remove it. If it is a tree, make sure it is not covered by a Tree Protection Order – check with your local council. If you are in a Conservation Area, all trees above a certain size are protected, and you will need permission to fell.

Leave big trees to the tree surgeons: felling can be seriously dangerous. If you are removing a smaller tree yourself, make sure you leave enough of the trunk standing so you can use it as a lever, later. And find a place to pile up all the debris, or ‘brash’, before you start. There may be a lot of it. Larger sticks could be stacked for drying, and burning. Smaller stuff will rot down eventually, especially if you chop it up first with shears or loppers.

Once you have a stump, you have three choices. The first is to leave it – you could use it as a coffee table or seat for years, before it rots. The second is to hire in a stump grinder – usually an extraordinary remote-control machine with a terrifying spinning cutting wheel that turns your entire stump into woodchips in a few noisy seconds. The third choice is to dig out around your stump until you can cut through all the visible roots – and then start levering; some people use a hi-lift jack and a chain to really get some purchase on it.

The most important tip, with a neglected garden, is psychological. Try not to look at it as an impossible task but as a garden gym. The process is part of the point. That said, the results can also be richly rewarding. It’s hard to make much difference, if you move into a house with a wonderful garden – other than to make it worse. A house with a neglected garden, though? Every little thing you do can be a huge improvement.

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