quick-fix city garden

This rear town garden was first laid out about 15 years ago. It had become overgrown and jaded, and the clients wanted a tidy-up that would involve removing the lawn, reducing maintenance (cutting back of old herbaceous plants eg.) and generally upgrading the garden in a more formal style.

The clients did not want to spend a lot of money on materials at this point, so we opted for basic timber edging and a gold coloured stone. I saved some of the plants in the garden already, particularly 2 small olives trees,  and added 3 classic weaping pears (Pyrus calleryana chanticleer) along the back wall. The rest of the beds are edged with box hedging, and filled with graphic repetitions of dwarf conifers and evergreen herbaceous plants. The year round variety is in leaf colour and form, with exclusively whit flowers added for seasonal effect - agapanthus, alliums, schizostyllus, convolvolus, We will add white-flowering climbers and more bulbs this spring.

This job was done in about 8 days - 1-2 days to remove old plants, then 2 days landscaping crew to clear the old elements into a skip, put down the edging and paths, prepare the beds. The rest was planting the hedging and new plants and trees. These beds are all mypexed and finished with a fine bark. Although I'm not a big fan of mypex, it does seriously reduce weeding, In this case the regular maintenance gardener did the planting and will do the maintenance on this garden - principally weeding under the box , clipping it twice a year, and generally tidying the flowering plants seasonally.