AIBU to rip out a beautiful garden in potential house?

😂

Nooooooo😮

Established borders are not actually as much work as you might fear. Empty space is far harder to keep tidy than a full herbacious border. I realise they can look daunting when you don't know what anything is, but these days with apps it should be easy to identify most things by leaf or flower.

Just make a file with a photo of each plant, the name and where in the garden it is. Diarise what it needs and when. Keep it simple. In most cases, for shrubs it's a once yearly trim over at the correct time of year for that specific shrub, depending on when it flowers. For perennials they'll just need cutting to the ground at any point after autumn and before the new growth starts in Spring. But even if you don't do that, they will just come up fresh each year with the previous year's foliage still rotting down around them.

For roses, they can be divided into three of four basic categories, but your standard hybrid tea rose just needs a really hard prune in spring, back to a quite sparse, basic framework and it's good to go again. Roses are actually a doddle so long as you know which type you are dealing with. Shrub/bush, hybrid tea, rambler or climber.

You can make it much more complicated than that if you want to, but most gardens will survive perfectly well on a basic regime like that.

But if you really want to rip plants out, please please put them to good use. You could invite people to come along and take what they want and have a charity pot with a suggested donation of a few pounds per plant, depending on size/value. Don't end up paying someone to remove them and dispose of them for you, that's madness.

Designate some areas to leave wild and have the rest as more controlled space. Rather than a clipped lawn, for instance, manage the grass as a wildflower meadow. Perhaps plant fruit trees in place of roses, and create a wildlife pond. There are lots of resources and groups on social media - search for 'wildlife gardening'.

Whatever you do, remember that birds will be busy nesting until August, so don't interfere with any hedges until after then.

Why does the DH have to mow?

Roses are easier than vegetables...

lumpy is fine, tussocky not so good, I looked into it

If they are similar standard to those pictures then yes, I think it’s pretty criminal.

Imagine wondering around that garden with a coffee and a little dog following you every summer’s morning. Bliss.

We bought a house with established gardens (no where near to the degree you’re talking about OP, and we’ve just learnt on the job, they may not be as immaculate as the previous owners had them, but they’re still beautiful. My young children love it, and they would love playing hide and seek around all those trees.

I would buy the house, keep the garden going for a year to see what work it is (in the winter there will be barely anything to do) and then see how you get on. If you have to pay a gardener £200 every summer to do hedges and edges and your DH can keep on top of the mowing, it may not be too bad.

I’d buy it and pay a gardener to come once every so often to refresh it. I think realistically in this country you’ll only need to pay someone 4-5 times a year. I understand your pain because we hate gardening too but I think tearing a garden up like that would indeed be sacrilege.

The talk about robot mowers reminds me of this story:

The first post - “So one of my neighbors has a lawn Roomba or whatever they're called, and this thing trundles around looking like a background robot in the background of the original trilogy, and ABSOLUTELY BAFFLING THE DOGS.
They have concluded, I think, that it's some kind of prey animal because right after this video ended they decided to crouch down and stalk it, which means I'm 90% sure I'm going to have to stop Arwen from eating it at some point.”

The reply - “Of course it's a prey animal it fucking eats GRASS“

The OP came back - “While I can’t fault your reasoning on robot taxonomy, apparently we’re both wrong: Arwen, as much as she is a high-prey-drive animal, is foremost, a herding dog, and has decided that the Lawn Roomba is a SHEEP.

What happened is the lawn roomba belongs to the guy that does most of the maintainence on the neighborhood park, and he had it out grazing on a different section of lawn when my parents came down for a walk and Arwen was seized by 200 years worth of Kelpie Instincts, rolled out of her Harness and proceeded to herd the shit out of this tiny, oblivious robot.

Everything was on display- mock-stalking, intimidating eye contact, barking, running in front of it to try to get it to balk, the scariest barking she can muster (which is actually. pretty scary if you’re not used to Loud Dogs), looking back at my parents for directions. or rather, looking at my Mom while Dad tried unsuccessfully to capture her.

After about ten minutes they realized she wasn’t biting it, and decided to let her play Sheep Simulator 5000 for a while. She eventually figured out that

• It doesn’t respond to Yelling, Posturing or Aggressive Eye Contact
• It does respond to having it’s wheels or bump hazards hit
• It would respond to its side being nosed or slapped by moving in a different direction

“Hey.” Said Roger, owner of the robot. “Do you think if I put the ramp down she’ll herd it into the back of my pickup?”

Arwen was mostly asleep in the afternoon sun as roger put the ramp down but woke right up when mom Whistled, then pointed at the truck. She immediately went after the robot and did something that wouldn’t have occured to me, an allegedly more intelligent being: the robot is roughly triangular, and when it hits an obstacle, will change direction so that one of its other sides (rather than points) is now the ‘front’. So to get it to move in a straight line in the direction she wanted, Arwen would smack the two sides of the robot that she didn’t want it to go in in quick sucession, and got it across the field, over a small hill and up the ramp as fast as it’s clumsy little wheels could go.

“I didn’t know you had a fully-trained sheepdog!” Said Roger
“Me either.” said Mom.

So Arwen now has a Semi-Weekly Appointment to play with Sheepbot.”

This. Maybe find a different house with fake grass and little maintenance. There are lots of houses around

You can do what you want with it. Although I'd question whether, if you don't have it in you to maintain some herbaceous borders, you'd have what it takes to commit to growing vegetables. That'a far more labour intensive, difficult and time consuming.

Just don't dig up the plants and chuck them on a skip. Invite people to come and dig them up for you and take them away to re-use. In fact the people selling the house might love the chance to do that for a small discount on the asking price. Or you could dig them up and pot them and sell them. Just don't waste them by slinging them on a skip. That would be awful.

I'd consider getting an experienced gardener in to look at what can be kept that will be nicely low maintenance. It's a massive space and you do want to at least retain lots of nice shrubs for some structure and interest, or it will look like a football pitch. I'd keep the area immediately abutting the house as pretty as possible, and devote a large area further away from the house as lawns for climbing frames and football goals etc.

2 acres of uneven land so no. But in any event my garden is now very different to the way it was when we bought the house.

Anyway @Mum2HC, if you do decide to buy this house AND you decide to clear the garden AND you happen to be somewhere in the North of England (Yorkshire, NE, or Cumbria) can I please have as many of the plants you want to take out as I can fit in my car???

This! That’s not a big job. You cut down to the ground in spring anything dead and if you don’t want weeds you mulch.

The more plants the less space for weeds. Please don’t rip it out without seeing how little work it takes!

There's one on a huge lawn I walk past - I mean cricket pitch sized - and that just seems to trundle about happily on its own.

And my friends have one and their lawn is quite lumpy and it works fine.

They take themselves back to the charging station?! I bet that looks funny! 😆

Good though!

Please don't do this. I'm heartbroken thinking about it. It's a beautiful garden that should be treasured and protected. A fortnightly gardener wouldn't break the bank - honestly I'd cut back elsewhere to be able to afford the gardener in this situation.

https://www.28dayslater.co.uk/threads/baron-hill-hall-n-wales-feb-22.138415/

@Mum2HC Gardens need to work for the people who have them and the stage they are at. I suggest you completely re-frame your position, starting with what we can do to make it work for us, now and in the future. Not ‘ripping out’, but evolving.

Realistically you are likely to need to hire in some help with maintenance, and acquire a substantial lawn mower or pay for a lawn service. Decommissioning hard standing will cost. Get rid of all/most pots. Talk to current owners and ask for breakdown of tasks and hours. Probably money well spent to have a consultation with a garden designer and explore costs of getting someone in to do hedges and other pruning.

You are not presiding over destruction, but evolution. The vendors presumably are moving because it’s too much for them. It’s too much for you as it is, and for other prospective buyers

The well established beds are probably not as labour intensive as you fear. You’re planning to reduce by 50%, not spray off and kill everything and put down astroturf. Living with it as is for a year is not bad advice usually, but you may need to act earlier

Good luck! You never know, you may get into gardening but you don’t have to keep it in aspic

The ones I have seen take themselves back to their charging station when the battery gets low. For a large lawn, you might need a herd and I think they only work on manicured lawns, not football pitches

The people who bought my family home did this and literally sieved a 200 plus year old garden! It might sound dramatic but the visual trauma was one of the most traumatic things in a very horrible part of my life. My parents loved their garden and it was home to all sorts of wildlife.

Once you buy a property you can obviously do what you like and I was expecting new owners would make changes to it but such destruction was on another level. If you like the house then I would say live in the garden for a year first and work out what you need from the space - a well planned established garden can be less upkeep than a veg garden and more fun/pleasing than just grass. I would have also appreciated the opportunity to take/giveaway more plants etc!

You do what you need to do. I know for me, I would do absolutely nothing, it would go to rack and ruin and then I'd spend a few days ripping it all out. I also couldn't keep up with gardening like that, as beautiful as it is.

Maybe some shrubbery would be easier to maintain than flowers?

Oh yeah, do this @Mum2HC - GET A GOAT - if you do get the house, and end up 'lawning' it all.

I'm sure that's not the right word, (lawning) but I can't think what is! 😆

I do agree with pps that 0.8 of an acre is BIG. We have half an acre, and that's a lot! Hard work, but I love it.

I haven’t had time to RTFT but for what it’s worth: 0.8 of an acre is a BIG garden if you do not like gardening. A few of our neighbours have gardens that size and it actually puts off prospective buyers as many simply do not want the maintenance. It’s fine to grass over if that is better for you but honestly, it sounds like you’d be better off finding a house with a more manageable garden.