To think people can make more of an effort with their gardens

If you have the privilege of some outdoor space it’s a shame that you don’t or can’t look after it. If you have no time/ money/ interest then there are schemes in some places that lend your garden to others as an allotment. They grow produce and will give you some of that produce as rental.

Well if you had written a more empathetic post and perhaps kindly given some easy gardening tips - like where to get free seeds, how to maintain a garden with not much work, easy things to plant etc that would have been more helpful.

Your post was unfortunately critical and condescending.

Are you my judgy elderly neighbour?

Because if you are, I will tell you again, I have 2 kids, I work on average 50 hours a week, I have a mother than needs some care, it’s a struggle to keep on top of the house cleaning, food shopping, after school activities, menopause AND be there for my kids.

So mind your beak, if it bothers you that much, don’t look at it and pick your dog shit up.

Your estate should be part of a tenants association, join, get involved and start a gardening club! Try the TA, council, parks team, garden centres etc. for funding or donations even of old or damaged stock, plants that need a little TLC. Or failing that family bulb planting days for a small donation or bring your own.

Hopefully it will do.
BUT
sometimes with the best will in the world, people have money restraints, time restraints, and health restraints.
I agree that some may have zero interest, or to the other extreme, they use their space as a dumping ground.

I would love to garden more than I do, I've battled a chronic illness for forty years.
I've seen neighbours openly looking at my front garden at times, and I am not neurotic, but you know when you're being dissed.
I hope you can create a beautiful garden, I love to look at a well stocked creation.
I just can't do it myself.
Maybe you don't mean to be, but please think before you judge, it's not always as simple as just buying a few seeds.

Op you are on a site where people argue to death that 7 minutes of exercise day is not doable time wise/money wise. Of course they will argue about basic gardening not being doable. 😂

It's a shame, you are right, for environment. I slowly built up garden with many on sale plants, had lots of bees, butterflies and other creatures, minimal tools and maybe an hour a week all together spent on it, winter weeks not even that. Little bit more 2x a year - spring and autumn, for clear up/start up.
It has positives for MH generally as pp mentioned too.

I don't give a single shit what the patch of land adjacent to my house looks like tbh

I think the UK needs to have some kind of Big National Conversations about housing formats and gardens, to be honest.

I live in a condominium outside the UK. We have good soundproofing, multiple elevators, big airy balconies for sitting out on and potted plants and kids' chalk/padding pools, and there are playgrounds and good parks within reach, and a big carfree plaza at the foot of the building for biking and rollerblading, and life is good.

I've had some REALLY weird responses from people in the UK when they discover I'm raising children in a flat without a garden. Almost like I've suggesting raising children inside a cage, basically. People are often very very negative about it.

I don't really see when I'd have time to tend or use a garden. My mum was a stay at home mum in a culdesac of other SAHMS, many of whom had three (or more) kids. I can see they found it very useful to be able to turn their kids out into the garden as they were around the house so much, and their gardens were used for years; the mums had loads of time to make the gardens really nice, too.

Fast forward to 2025: I, like, most mums work almost fulltime. My kids use afterschool cares and daycares, which take them to parks and playgrounds. Weekends, we're out most of the time. Weekend mornings already have to be spent catching up "things that didn't get done in the week" (letters/papers, housework that didn't get done, fixing things round the flat); if I also had to find time to deal with a sodding garden, I think I'd scream, frankly. And we'd seldom use it.

In the UK, climate change is making the UK's already wet, rainy summers even rainier and wetter; my UK friends with gardens mostly seem to describe them as mud-generation spaces or barely used at all, in the last couple of years. Few families have 4-5 kids these days, and the idea is to pack a couple of kids in tight so you can return to your career, so the years when children actually use gardens to play in are very limited. Companies are ordering people back to the office. All in all, it's hard to avoid the feeling that a lot of UK people like the idea of having a garden more than they like the reality.

Of course it's complicated, because I also do know people who genuinely love their gardens, do lots of work in them and turn them into real bowers of Eden for all the birds and butterflies, and I'm happy that they have their gardens to bring them joy.

But, perhaps there is a need for a national conversation about the need to consider a bit more variety in household styles - like, many not everyone has the time or inclination or garden and/or is likely to use one much, and perhaps it's OK to suggest some alternative living styles that some people might like? Apartment living with nice spacious balconies, tall narrow townhouses around shared courtyard gardens with maintenance fees. Leasehold reform would really help, here.

Thing is, every person who lives in an apartment is saving a whole bunch of wilderness from the concrete-spreader: not just because of the housing-land-footprint they are saving, but also because if you want to give people private gardens, you have to let developments sprawl outwards, which in turn means more car usage: more roads must be built, existing roads must be widened, more and more parking spaces will be required all over cities. The "concrete/tarmac footprint" required to provide a single family with a garden is massive, after you take all the above into account. And yet the UK is planning to build several million more homes. And it's already one of the world's most nature depleted countries.

Bearing all this in mind, I do think the UK is going to have to have a hard think about "Are we going to continue to insist that everyone with a child must live in a house with a garden, even though a lot of the time it barely gets used and the parents quite often have no time for it and resent its presence?"

i do think think the time thing is only partly true. Most of us spend way too long staring at our phones. I really worry for our kids. It is having an increasing impact on them.

Re: the whole "Weeds support wildlife too!" Yes, they do. But they also make places look really really rundown and depressing, and there are valid and probably reasonable concerns that they attract antisocial behavior and crime.

Abandoned villages/towns are not common in the UK for a bunch of reasons, but I've seen enough of them in some parts of the world. The plants growing all over and in and out of things, higgledy piggeledy, sprouting out of walls and buildings, piercing pavements, give places a depressing and eerie look - the look of a place that lacks people or where people don't go any more.

If UK towns and cities are finding it increasingly hard to create tended, tidy-looking flowers and greenery inside their city boundaries, it would make more sense to shrink and densify cities so that more and bigger wildnerness areas can be left pristine and untouched OUTSIDE cities. Rather than letting cities stay oversized and sprawly with all the wilderness bits all over them, within the boundaries of the cities, making the place look like some run-down semi-abandoned post-Soviet village where everyone's moving away and preparing to let the place disappear.

I grew up in a third floor flat in a council block . We had a window box on the balcony. The whole estate was devoid of greenery. I started to notice front gardens in the posh area I had my paper round. I really think that if you have a patch of land however small it should be treasured. Yes disability and spare cash and time will affect what you can do. Just do something small to attract butterflies . Watching them fly and alight on something you have planted will be so lovely. Our wildlife is seriously under threat with species disappearing or reducing in number

I can do about half an hour of gardening before my back goes and I'll have a couple of weeks of pain. I can play tennis for 2-3 hours without the same effect, so guess what I'd choose to do.

I doubt nowadays growing food saves much money, if anything I think it's probably more expensive except possibly long term hardy plants.
All the suggestions cost money to start up. Make your own compost =compost bin and the compost will take time etc
Tomatoes cost of plants, feed, and round here you'll want grow bags and slug detergents or you'll have a row of little stumps left by day 3.
I'll swear slugs round here have homing devices to any new plants.

Even our fairly well established Apple trees if they don't get fed regularly don't produce anything of note. We love the fresh apples, but I don't think we've saved any money.

Just buy a few pots isn't cheap easy answer. Pot £5, plants to put in £10. Now you need to feed it and remember to water it when hot. Oh, now it's growing out of the pot so I need a new one...

And op isn't exactly selling her garden. Potato plants that didn't produce doesn't fill me with hope that she knows how much effort it is.
Ds (12 at the time) grew potatoes in lockdown. He dug a trench (in the middle of the lawn!) Planted lots of seed potatoes, and got a good return.
But he was out there daily watering, twice when it was hot, weeding, feeding them, removing bugs, and then harvesting. It took a lot of time.

Whatever you call them, I'd happily see their numbers decline to zero. Filty, noisy, aggressive vermin.

The only thing you can really do OP is concentrate on your own space and hope others are inspired. Maybe plant a few extra seedlings and offer a few to your immediate neighbours etc. if money and time are an issue then pick perennials rather than annuals. You may well find that if you are out there a lot tending your garden others start to show an interest.

I’m now lucky enough to have a large garden but I remember when I was younger two kids on the estate used to come and linger when my Dad was outside gardening. He would chat to them and ask if they wanted to help and give them little clumps of things to put in their gardens.
unfortunately some people either can’t afford it, are physically incapable or just don’t have any free time. But there are people on here who really just want an argument with anyone at any opportunity so don’t take it to heart

I guess it's down to priorities and having the time to maintain a garden? Also, possibly, ownership might play a part for rented properties. No idea. But I'd rather people had tidy gardens as a starting point, then branch out to create a garden with a variety of plants.
Growing your own vegetables/fruit is overrated with the climate in this country unless you want an endless supply of courgettes or you view it as a hobby.
Much, much cheaper to buy organic. I know this for a fact because we've been growing (well, attempting) a variety of items over the years.
It's not just the cost of buying everything, but it's the time you need to invest in setting up and maintaining a garden. Time costs money, as they say.

What I actually wanted to say OP, last summer I didn't see a single bee in our garden. And we have plenty of bee friendly plants. Quite a few bumblebees and less butterflies than usual. I think because of the weather or general decline in bees population. Nothing to do with gardening as such because we have a fully landscaped mature garden full of all sorts of wildlife and neighbouring properties are very similar. That's much more worrying than the visual aspect of garden areas.

The £60 to cut the lawn has to cover their overhead including paying for equipment, petrol, transportation/work lorry, admin/paperwork time, marketing expenses, travel time, insurance, taxes and other costs. As well as their effort and expertise. It's not all profit. By far.

Honestly OP I think you are being so unfair and short sighted.

You would look down your nose at our garden - just well kept grass and a patio.

I am disabled and cannot do the gardening and my husband does not have the time to do so / isn’t interested enough to make it a priority over other things that do motivate and interest him in his few spare hours a week.

We have had such difficulty even employing a gardener! The rates are ridiculous and even when you pay them, they often don’t turn up. I’m talking £60 to cut the lawn (20 mins?)

We are in north west london and there are constant requests for recommendations for a gardener on local groups.

Then when we’ve had quotes for adding flowers, shrubs, trees etc it’s absolutely mind blowing - £10k easily for super basic stuff. And then we were worried about having a consistent gardener maintain it,..

So there are so many barriers for so many people and most definitely not an issue of being in ‘a council estate’. The cost and time to maintain a garden is often far too much, even for those with higher disposable income.

Someone said that people don’t know how to garden. They often don’t know how to diy or maintain their cars.
I think it’s the advent of screens -there’s always the option of doing something easier to pass the time.

Can you recommend a particular wildflower mix by any chance? On my list of things to do in the garden but reviews around seed germination vary wildly between brands/supppliers

My impression is that basic knowledge about plants, trees and the natural world has been in decline for a while, and people don't know where to start. Gardens should be a pleasure not a chore.

Agree @Trousername. I also think phones and digital apps suck and hold attention and time, and make going outside too onerous. It takes very little effort to do a bit in your garden for some result, and more community gardening initiatives would help. And incentives! My very low income, hard working parents were house AND garden proud and would have been too ashamed of what the neighbours thought to have a concreted-over garden.

At a guess, they get plants and tools.

I agree, it's really depressing when you see people who are lucky enough to have gardens (many people don't have any outside space) not bothering to do anything, or worse still, paving it all over. I wonder if people tend to overestimate how much time and effort is actually involved? It doesn't take long to shove a few bulbs in the earth, plant a couple of flowering bushes, or just scatter some seeds occasionally, and the rewards are fantastic and long lasting.
And most gardens don't need that much maintenance once a few plants are in place.

My impression is that basic knowledge about plants, trees and the natural world has been in decline for a while, and people don't know where to start. Gardens should be a pleasure not a chore.

Not everyone enjoys or has time for gardening
Look into companion planting to attract bees - and/or do a bee keeping course and keep your own.

What on earth are you talking about?

It's mildly relevant to anyone who wants to do the same thing. It's irrelevant if they don't.

But how is that relevant to what other people who don’t have money do?