A simple make-over

The majority of my work this year has comprised garden maintenance activities. Typically, this involves regular lawn mowing together with keeping shrubs and garden borders looking their best.

With my current work with the National Trust holiday cottages at Snowshill, regular seasonal gardening tasks are the norm, but I have had a few opportunities to ring the changes with revitalising the planting in some of the cottage gardens.  This has comprised the complete removal of old material and overgrown areas, reshaping a couple of borders and the slow introduction of some purchased plants together with my own supplied plants.

When I remember, I take photographs to remind myself of the ‘before’ and ‘after’ situations; most of these have been of the holiday cottages. However, recently I was asked to put together a simple planting scheme to tidy-up and slightly remodel an open plan estate garden. I took the opportunity to get some ‘before’ photographs to help with the planting scheme and after implementation some ‘after’ shots to help view the changes.

The following photographs give a fair representation of what was and what currently is.

I also include a simple planting plan that helped pull things together. The overall brief was that the planting should be simple, easy to maintain and robust. The plants chosen reflect this and whilst fairly common should provide a welcome range of foliage, flower and scents, whilst not developing into problem plants (or as Alan Titchmarsh once said: “thugs”).

The overall transformation took me 2 days; comprising the removal of old stumps and roots, thoroughly digging over the whole border area removing stone, weed, roots etc, and the introduction of 800 Litres of composted manure before putting in the plants.

Before-1

Before-2

Before-3

Before-4

Before-5

After-1

After-2

Planting plan