The garden hadn’t been touched for a few years. The lawn had turned into a beautiful meadow, and the bottom area of the garden had been completely overtaken by dense brambles. The shed and greenhouse could barely be seen, with lovely rose bay willow herb growing up around them. Although this isn’t something that is necessarily wanted in a residential garden, I particularly loved the wildness of nature reclaiming the land.
Although the pond had not been looked after at all, there were still frogs in the pond and lots of bees and insects buzzing their way around the garden.
We started off by weeding the patio, and then ventured into cutting back shrubs and hedging around the perimeter of the garden. This was followed by an initial strimming session to cut back the meadow. Annual weeds were pulled out by the root – a very satisfying task, and then the brambles were cut down to the ground with the hedge cutter. It was great to see the transformation of this garden, and to hear our customer’s happy memories of how beautiful it was when his parent’s were alive. However, three days attacking brambles was pretty full on…
We raked the lawn and strimmed again, raking, strimming and cutting back. From power tools to lopers and secateurs, everything was employed to get the job done.
Whilst this was all going on in the back garden, we also thoroughly weeded the front garden and trimmed the hedge, and then planted Lavender around the patio, with a low growing variety of Pittosporum at the top. These are both low maintenance, drought tolerant plants and will look great when the prospective buyers arrive to view the house in the coming months.
My favourite part of working on this garden was pruning the apple tree. It had become swamped in weeds and shrubs growing up it, and had a fair amount of dead and damaged wood on it. I felt very happy with the outcome, it has a beautiful shape and is a lovely focal point within the garden.
As we were working we uncovered stepping stones across the lawn, these had to be cut out with lawn edgers as the grass and weeds had created a thick mat across the top of them. We also found a good looking rhubarb crown with two compost bins behind the apple tree.
Whilst we were in the final stages of cutting of the gardening George set to work painting the shed and back fence in Forest Green by Ronseal. The neighbour came over and was given lots of plastic plant pots and trays from the greenhouse, we were also kindly given lots of gardening tools that were not wanted. After us a clearance company was due to visit to remove everything as waste, so it was good to be able to save and recycle/reuse some of these things.
I can imagine that this garden was an absolute haven in previous years, the owners obviously cared for it a great deal before becoming ill and elderly. I bet the greenhouse was abundant with veg and children playing around it.
Overall we are very pleased with the outcome of this garden, and are glad that we could give our customer the possibility to see it transformed to how he remembers, before it is sold.
Come back next time to see the next project that we are working on in Bristol!
