Moved house, fabulous new garden with lovely but overgrown flower beds. I like the wild look but I need to tame them but is it the wrong time of year??

[VanillaPumpkin]

I am a gardening newbie (underestimation). I don't know what anything is even, so that is my first mission I suppose. But I did read somewhere not to prune / cut back in the Autumn......What might happen?? What would you do?
TIA

[ClareVoiant]

i'm rubbish at gardening, but my advice would be to wait until it all dies off in the winter then remove the dead stuff, don't dig anything up! then remove the weeds in the spring. You may have some lovely plants,but you wont really know what you've got til next autumn when your garden has gone full circle,iyswim.

i'm sure an expert will come along soon and tell you what you should be doing with it

[MissKubelik]

I'm not an expert gardener by any means, but I would just do a quick tidy-up now - i.e. mow lawn, pull out any obvious weeds, cut back anything that is hideously overgrown - then leave the rest until the spring. Different plants prefer pruning at different times, according to when they flower, so spend the winter looking at gardening books to prepare yourself for next year!

[VanillaPumpkin]

Great. That makes sense thank you. Our neighbours have said there is a beautiful plant at the front in the spring time so we are looking forward to seeing that . Exciting isn't it?

[Pannacotta]

Is it worth getting a gardener/landscaper to come and quote for doing a bit of a tidy up?
Lots of things can be pruned now but it depends what they are.
If you found someone nice they could help with identifying what you have, then you can look up yourself on line what sort of maintenance the garden needs.
Lucky you btw, our new garden is mainly much empty bar 8 huge leylandii which need removing (and lots of ground elder)...

[VanillaPumpkin]

Oh if this was my house forever I think that would be an excellent idea thank you.
Unfortunately we are a forces family and so a move at some point in the next 1-3 years is inevitable. I will cry as we will never have a house and garden as lovely as this one again.
I think I am doubly excited about this garden as, (like yours it seems), the last garden we had didn't even have a flower bed and was overlooked by six other houses all at once.

[Furball]

our garden is like that VanillaPumpkin - it's beautiful, or it was 2 years ago!. The first year we were here things popped up, it was literally like a living firework display and something different everyday would burst through. Now, it fends for itself and things still pop up, if we don't like it or it's in the wrong place we dig it up and compost it or move it. Just go with the flow of it, you will find you will recognise more common flowers/plants as you go along and you can look on t'interweb how to look after them. If your beds are really packed, weeds have trouble finding a spot. Get yourself a Hoe and move the soil about abit (technical stuff!!) and weeds if there are any just get lifted out.

[Furball]

with cutting back - we just cut stuff back to what we wanted and we haven't killed anything off yet.

[VanillaPumpkin]

Great. My Dad mentioned a hoe . Time to invest I think. We only have a fork and a rubbish rake at the mo.
I wish the rain would stop so I could get out there properly. I am going to take pictures to try to find out what the stuff is on google. Should be fun.