Bees, brambles, husband... which is the problem??

[BornToBeStyled]

Please can you help me figure out an issue I feel that, at 48 years old, I should be able to figure out myself?

Garden extremely overgrown - mainly with brambles, but also any other manner of wild plants. It's truly wild.

So, I realise this is really lovely for the bees and birds. Chuffed about that.

But it's getting harder to sit in, and I don't like the brambles (even if the bees do love the flowers).

Would like to get on top of it ourselves, but it's just not happening (huge amounts on at work, ageing parents, tricky kids, etc). I never get time.

Friend of family looking for work. He's offered to come in and do some bramble clearance. I'm delighted - said yes.

Now husband really upset. Really upset about bees, making me feel like it's immoral and unreasonable to want garden not bordered entirely by metres of brambles (not growing up in lawn too, which is also massively overgrown). And now I'm anxious and upset about the bees, too. Will they die? Can they find somewhere else to go? I know it's a bad time of year to cut back, but it's also just before the summer, when I'd like the kids to be able to use the garden better.

Husband wants us to do "little bits together" (we might have an hour every 2 weeks, I reckon) - just not feasible IMHO (and annoys me when he knows how completely overwhelmed I'm feeling).

Opinions, please?

A couple of year’s ago after a lot of nagging my DH went out to deal with our brambles. Strimmer wasn’t even shaking them. He ended up using a hedge trimmer. If your brambles have been there a while (over a year) I’d say strimming is useless. Strimmers are for grass/stinging nettles not thick stems.

How confident are you that your friend has a clue what he’s doing? The last thing you want him doing is just lobbing them down to the ground and calling it job done. They need digging up or they’ll be unruly again by autumn. The fact he’s suggesting a strimmer makes me think he doesn’t have a clue.

He needs some ‘lobbers’ basically the kind of things you use to cut off small branches. I had a pair from TK Maxx for £20 or so that cut the brambles down with little effort.

Plants lots of nepeta (catmint) too. Bees absolutely love it, it’s a beautiful plant, very easy to maintain, gets quite big, comes back every year.

Thank you all again. OK, I've put a halt on power tools at least for now. Going to get extendable loppers. Sometimes I wonder why I was ever allowed to be a grown-up, the mountain I can make out of what others (maybe?) would think of as mole hills(?).

To keep bees happy you need a range of plants so that there will be something flowering at every point from spring to autumn, and they don't have to be time-consuming annuals - there are plenty of shrubs and perennials you can just plant and leave to get on with it. A bramble monoculture is no good!

One of the earliest flowering shrub that bees like is mahonia, and ivy is the last thing in the autumn, but you can find lots to fill in the gaps between. I have a huge ceanothus in my garden, which is covered in beautiful purple-blue flowers at the moment, and you can hear the bees buzzing over it from the other end of the garden.

Maybe you could leave one little corner of the garden as a wild patch to keep your DH happy?

Some photos. Hard to get an idea of scale. Garden is actually pretty big. These show some "lawn"(!) and some brambles etc

Looks like the bramble is less than 2 foot high? That's really not that bad. I'd remove the ones in the shade, but keep a few in the sun for best flowers and fruit. Tie them to the fence/canes so they don't grow further into the grass. Totally doable with leather gloves, secateurs, loppers, a fork, a sturdy woven garden waste bag, and patience. I suspect Norbot the strimmer boy would also strim down your lovely buttercups!

PM me if you're in East London, I actually have a NVQ level 1 in practical horticulture and used to remove bramble on a nature reserve 😂 and have a tall wild 'lawn', no brambles allowed after years of removing them for work though.

It makes sense to use a strimmer on the "lawn", as it is too long for most mowers.
You could leave an area in the centre as a "meadow" for now, and just cut all around the edges. Then you can more easily reach the brambles.

Tip - when you have cut down all the brambles and are digging out the roots with a big fork, you can use secateurs or loppers on the roots to make it easier if some root balls are too big: cut the side roots and dig them out separately, which just leaves the main root to dig out in one go.

Your garden sounds like mine, OP.
I have a bramble bush that my son bought for me, ( as a tiny twig), at a Primary school fête eons ago. It completely takes over the garden if I don't keep it in check.
As a PP suggested, maybe keep a small patch that can be easily maintained then you and your DH can reach a compromise.

That doesn't look that bad to deal with at all - he can just chip away at it. I was thinking the whole garden brambles.

@FatherFrosty (sorry this is a tangent to your thread, OP) do you recall where you got your clover/daisy/grass seed mix from? And did it come up nicely? We're planning to pull up our paving next year and put down a lawn, and that sounds lovely 😍

I bought some from here - https://wildflowerlawnsandmeadows.com/product/wild-flower-lawn-seed-mix/

I’ve still got the pack somewhere as I slightly over ordered
I will have a look.

I’ve been really really pleased, I’ve used it on the verge in the front where it needs to be low for visibility. It’s a great mix of Daisy’s, red & white clover as well as grass so it’s still got coverage without looking like unkept weeds (even though they are really!). Bees adore it.
couldn’t recommend it enough

If you're really serious about the bees, please buy organic replacement plants. A lot of garden centre plants, even bee friendly ones, have so much insecticide on that they actually kill insects for the first year.

If you can cope with something nearly as wild as brambles, loganberry is popular with my bees, less spikey, and tastier. It is a bit of a triffid though

We have a very over grown garden due to our recent health issues.

We mow a path down through it, have created an area to sit under the trees and I love it far more now. Birds, animals moths, OMG the moths are stunning!

I planned to mow it all and return it to the agricultural land it actually is but I won't until just before I sell it.

This is where mines from
www.prettywildseeds.co.uk/product/daisy-clover-lawn-grass-seed-hardwearing-tough-lawn-with-rye-grasses-1481

Did you see Gardeners' World last night, featuring bee-besotted man? Skip to about 19 minutes in.
It was filmed recently so it features lots of spring flowers (now going over), you will have to think about flowers for other seasons.

Yes, I saw the bee man, he was great.

It's not only bees you want to attract, you want a big a range of insects as possible and for that you need a whole range of different plants, all flowering at different times. A virtual monoculture of brambles isn't that good for biodiversity.

I recommend Dave Goulson's books, The Garden Jungle is a good starting point.

I have to sneakily get rid of brambles before they flower as DH is a butterfly fanatic and admittedly the butterflies seem to prefer them to many other plants.
To get rid of them without digging if you keep cutting the new juicy shoots back before they get too big they eventually give up.
Or use weedkiller, as I do sometimes.

I have found easy garden plants that the bees enjoy are herbs like marjoram and thyme; also buddleia, sedum, bush germander. We also have a pretty wild lawn for the butterflies and fleabane is a popular wild plant for the bugs. Later in the early autumn if you have ivy flowering in your garden you might get ivy bees.

Yes, on tv, one of the gardening programmes? Did an experiment monitoring a garden which was completely left to go wild and another which was wildlife friendly but tended, with a variety of plants and flowers and the tended one had more wildlife in it and visiting.

Rip out the brambles and plant some mint. It will grow like mad, but the bees love the flowers. It's also much easier to cut back again. Brambles are bastards.

Wild marjoram is a big fave with the bees in my garden - it grows everywhere looks quite pretty and has a lovely fragrance.

Im not averse to some brambles, I have a big garden, but you can't let them take over your whole patch.

Nooooooo!
Don't plant mint. You can get rid of bramble, not sure you can get rid of mint.

It's deafening in my garden at the moment! The bees (lots of different ones) are out in force and you can hear their buzzing from inside the house! Not a bramble in sight (nor dandelions - in 30 years here have never seen a bee on a dandelion!). We have lots of azaleas and rhododendron (no lawn), jasmine, wallflowers, roses, gladioli, lillies, heathers (ones which flower in different seasons), buddleia, lavender, poppies (oriental and californian), nandinia, and more as well as all sorts of bulbs in planters on the patio. We had big bumble bees in February and will probably still have bees in November (like last year). Everything I plant is for the pollinators - we must also have a lot of insects as the garden is full of birds and butterflies too as well as bats at dusk.

I just went for a walk and all the wild comfrey is out in flower and it was absolutely covered in bees... beautiful to see and a much better addition including others that have been suggested to you than brambles and nettles!

Buddleia are super easy to grow from cuttings from and the butterflies and bees love them.

My garden was humming with bees last summer. I had a variety of plants but they were all over the musk mallow and cosmos. Easy plants to grow and they look lovely. Grown in pots too so it would be easy for you to put them where the brambles were.