Landscape gardener Will Nash offers 10 encouraging tips on where to start when you want to do something new with your outside space.
Will Nash is a seasoned landscape gardener with many decades of green-fingered experience. However, he is a firm believer in making gardening as accessible and easy as possible even for beginners. ‘Leave the science of acid soils and complicated plant names to other people and just get on with planting things you’ll really enjoy when you’re looking out at your garden or you’re sitting in it,’ he says.
Whether you want to completely overhaul your garden and pay for a gardener to come and do some work for you, or you feel the time is right to invest in a new spade and get out there yourself, here are a few starting tips to get you going.
Will’s first tips on starting a garden
• Stand back and see what you’ve got.
If you’ve just moved in to your home, wait and see what comes up before digging over the garden. Even if the previous owners told you what’s in the garden they might have forgotten a few really great little flowers here and there. Give the garden until at least late spring – you’ll find something that looked like dead twigs is actually clematis!
• Don’t presume the garden’s ruined after frost.
If you’re worried that a lot of frost and a bitter winter will mean you have to do lots of work come spring, don’t be too sure. Frost can make the best plants under the ground all the stronger, so don’t rip them out and spend money on new plants until you’ve seen what survived.
• Watch this space.
Over the course of the seasons, try to keep an eye on what parts of the garden tend to get more shade and more light. Especially during the summer months. This will help you decide what kinds of spring, summer or even late summer plants will do well in the various corners.
• Be confident.
Sometimes it seems like the garden is just too big a job. I worked on a garden for one family where all they needed really was a bit of straightening out of the patio and steps and then the mum got stuck in with creating a wonderful garden with flowers she found herself. Their back garden had really steep steps down to the lawn and that had just put them off – especially because they had small children. I created a high level deck coming straight out of their back doors, with safe railing and better steps. After that, I think they just felt their garden was easier to get into. That instantly made it feel like doing the garden itself wasn’t an impossible task, it was somewhere easy to be in and as a result, they saw it as somewhere they could enjoy planting up.
• Sort the basics and then feel free to do what you want.
You don’t have to radically change the shape of the garden. If you’re just planting it up, get in a few evergreens – to give you a bit of winter interest with berries and rich foliage – and then pick out flowers that suit your own taste after that. There’s no rule that your garden has to be a perfect version of someone else’s.
• Buy plants small.
Adult shrubs already fully formed are less predictable, often they don’t take when you plant them in your garden. Go for younger, smaller plants and when you plant them leave lots of space around them so they can grow into the space. Don’t be tempted to spend money on lots of plants that will cram your borders.
• If there’s any hard landscaping, get an expert.
It’s fine to get some exercise doing the gardening yourself, or getting your other half to help moving soil around, but if there’s building work and drilling required, it’s not worth the grief. And it’s not fair on hubby after a long day at work! If you’re making a hole in a wall, what’s behind it? What equipment are you going to need? Whilst it’s worth saving your money and doing some of the planting and lawn yourself, the structural stuff really is worth getting someone in who knows what he’s doing.
• If you’re getting a landscape gardener in…
Have an idea or some options that you want as your starting point. It’s your garden so don’t be bamboozled into having something that a designer or a landscape company want to do because it’ll look good in their brochure or it’s their pet idea! Sometimes they will jargon it up but remember it’s your choice in the end.
• When looking for the right gardener…
Ask around and get some personal recommendations from neighbours and local friends. Personally, I’d usually go for an older gardener, maybe even someone who is retired. That way you tend to get the kind of personal passion, expertise and the seasoned experience you don’t have yet yourself.
• Get the right inspiration.
I love the books by Dr DG Hessayon. ‘The Garden Expert’ books are written in really down to earth language, they have great pictures and they suggest projects you will be able to manage. Many gardening books are for really experienced gardeners or they use complicated language – you read a couple of pages and it all seems too much so you give up on your best intentions.