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

[Lovelybitofsquirrel3]

Due to circumstances changing I moved from the family home (owned, not by me, by family) to a council estate a few years ago.
Generally people don’t bother to plant anything/haven’t bothered with their gardens. There are hardly any bees, butterflies or insects that visit and I’m finding it depressing. A lot of people haven’t bothered with their gardens.
I planted potatoes last year which were never pollinated, and one or two bees visited, I don’t know where from and they died quickly.
I’m not looking for excuses as to why people don’t plant but surely it’s simple to buy a few packets of seeds and turn over some turf.

So people who don’t have busy gardens are <checks notes> soulless and miserable?

Personally I think people who make bonkers judgements of others on MN based on their taste are soulless and miserable but each to their own

Presumably she didn’t work. 8 hours extra a day is a lot

Also there’s a lot of generational trauma because people had WAY too many kids and older siblings needed up bringing them up. I don’t think that’s a better life personally.

My grandmother lived in a council flat with a sick husband, 4 kids and her own mother, she worked as a cleaner in a hospital and looked after her two sisters 6 kids while they went to work. She did not have 'a nice house with a presentable garden'. She also would have had no understanding of lifestyle choices, priorities or aspirations. Check your privilege (and possibly your grandmother's privilege while you're at it)

I love to see a nice garden, a nicely mowed lawn, nice borders, hundreds and hundreds of flowers - especially sunflowers, etc, and it would be nice if every garden could have all this, especially for the bees and the butterflies and the wildlife and the environment. So I get where you're coming from @Lovelybitofsquirrel3

But quite honestly, gardening is hard work, and not everybody's cup of tea, not even a small amount. We've got a big(ish) corner plot, a third of an acre, and I'm always planting lots of flowers, and making the garden look nice ... It's got bushes and hedges and heathers and hebes and little corners for the birds, and hedgehog houses, and little wild areas (for the wildlife obvs!) and lots of flower borders, and 3 lawns... I absolutely love my garden - and it's my main hobby. But to be honest, it is hard work/high maintenance.

Between March and October. I very rarely have more than two or three days out of the garden in any given week. I work part time from home couple of days a week, so have time for the garden. 90% of the time I love it, but about 10% of the time I just think 'man, this is such hard work!' I sometimes feel like I wanna concrete over it. (Don't worry, I won't!!! )

We have got about 20 houses in the road and only 5 us actually have lots of flowers and make a big effort with the garden. Although about another 20 houses in the other 100-ish houses in the village have beautiful well maintained 'flowery' gardens. It's mostly semi retired or retired people, (who make a huge effort with their garden,) because quite honestly, as quite a number of posters have said - it's really time consuming and really hard work, and they don't have time.

My husband doesn't do anything in the garden. He actually loathes gardening and I do it all (pretty much,) but that's because I absolutely love it. My dad loved gardening and my grandad did too, and I think I get it from them.

So I do get you - but also it is hard work, and time consuming and I get why some people don't do it. Even a smallish amount of turning the soil and weeding and planting is too much effort for some people, because they genuinely do not want to do it. And that's their right to be fair.

I can honestly say when I worked 3 or 4 days a week and had 2 children at home, I didn't do a quarter of the stuff in the garden I do now ... Although I did use to plant sunflowers and put some nice flowerbeds in. We had a much smaller garden then though, so it was much less maintenance/hard work.

Oh, and like some others here, I LOATHE artificial grass, and think it should be banned! 😬 Hideous stuff. bad for the environment, and looks shite (and fake!)

@JandamiHash
I'm disabled myself. I have a neurological condition that affects my mobility. I can't bend to dig so we have low maintenance garden filled with trees and shrubs.
We put decaying logs underneath the trees to make a bit of a haven for insects, small mammals and give the baby birds a place to be safe from predators.

Having a wildlife friendly garden doesn't have to mean hard work. I don't go out digging because I physically can't with my spinal problems, but our garden is filled with life. It doesn't need a lot of maintenance. Most of the time you just leave it be and nature does its wonderful thing.

Not everyone's lives are the same, not everyone's priorities are the same. OP and some PP don't seem to understand that.

Of course they do. What is hard to understand is the wide scale decline in gardens when it's actually quite important and useful thing both on a individual and societal level. All those grey paved/concreted/Astro turfed fronts add up.
Being poor in 70', 80's and 90's wasn't an easier sort of poor than now.

I contacted my local beekerper's association and they pointed out that because removing brickwork and floors was involved, no one was insured to do this. I ended up finding a pest control group that also did live bee removals, so went for those. Even they got stung loads and mentioned how aggressive that hive was.

There doesn’t need to be any type of bashing on how others live their lives.
The OP and quite a few others make very interesting and valid points re gardens though.
The artificial grass shite and paving is highly indicative of how people are living, how they are feeling etc.
But many are waking up to what nature can do. Have any of you seen green roofs on bus shelters now?
Lots more trees in city centres?
It helps with cooling down cities in the summers.
I bet a few of you have heard of ShinrinYoku……Japanese for ‘Forest Bathing’.
It is scientifically proven that spending time with plants and or nature have huge health benefits. The air you breathe is beneficial and healthier.
It doesn’t take much. Even I’m surprised how my garden is turning out and how it makes me feel. I do see people out walking with their dogs, or with their kiddies stop and look for a few seconds at my flowers. That’s amazing!
If people like myself can stop people, and we all know how bloody awful life can be at times, then it’s worth it.

The usual MN problem is creeping up.
It's not all or nothing. It's not paving or Royal show off garden. It's noy spending 0 or 1000s. It's not several hours vs nothing. There is so much inbetween (as with everything).
Literally just planting few flowering shrubs makes difference. That's what most people doing it seem to mean. You can even get buddleia for free like I did from a cutting I got by the trainstation😂

Also, it's not "the poors" who are astroturfing...

People will be defensive when they're being attacked, yes.

@Nameychangington its not a competition though. Your grandmother was well enough to work, juggle kids, mum and a sick husband. Check her privilege - other women aren't well enough to physically manage that. And she had a council flat, which according to some would be a massive privilege.

It’s not always as easy as chucking some seeds down. I just googled ‘low maintenance plants for clay soil’ and the RHS website told me I needed to do a lot of work improving the soil (which sounded expensive as well as time consuming) before I started planting anything. It’s also north facing, so low on light in some parts.

We have tried over the years. We have a handful of hebes still going. But most other things die. We had a wildflower patch for a while, but it was soon taken over by nettles and grass. Any fruit and vegetables we plant get eaten by the slugs and squirrels (and possibly rats as we live next to water). The compost attracted rats, so we stopped that. No room for a greenhouse.

My neighbour’s garden is admittedly lovely. But he is retired and has tended it for the past 20 years. When I do garden, I last about 30 mins before my back and knees start to hurt. And I get dirty and sweaty. It is not a pleasurable activity. So we focus on maintenance.

And I grew up helping family tend their gardens and was dragged around garden centres every weekend. So I can name a decent number of plants, know how to look after seedlings and take cuttings. But I don’t have the time, inclination, and frankly skill for our type of garden.

Ours is designed to be wildlife friendly and suitable for sporadic (when we're able) upkeep rather than very frequent too. The pond (tiny) that we dug in and lined with a bit of old carpet and a liner offcut from a neighbour is thriving with frogs and visiting bugs and birds. Most of our plants come from bits other people have put on our community WhatsApp as being got rid of, and I mostly use hands and a big kitchen spoon to plant with! It makes me happy watching passersby stop out side the garden and point out something to their kids.

I’m very pleased you can enjoying gardening @ScouserInExile despite your disability, it’s always nice to hear things like this. Makes me less worried for DS’s future

Yeah, I think it would be lovely, as I said, if everybody had a wonderful, glorious, flowery, tree-filled garden. But I genuinely know it's hard work. My next door neighbour does absolutely nothing in her garden. She even pays somebody to mow her lawn - cos she absolutely hates gardening.

Her garden's about 40% of the size of mine, as she isn't on a corner plot... She said to me, if she could snap her fingers and make her garden exactly like mine in the blink of an eye she would. She genuinely wants the garden to look really lovely and really nice. (I think a lot of people would like that.) But it's just so much effort, and time consuming and costly. It's a massive chore for some.

It's not cheap either, to fill my garden with tons of flowers and bushes and hebes. It's hard work and quite expensive. (I do love it and it is my main hobby but I get why other people don't do it.) Whilst I agree I don't want to have a soulless, barren future in our country - gardening is actually hard work. It's not just done in 5 minutes. And if you want to pay somebody to do it, it costs a bloody fortune. Landscaping. Have you ever priced it up? It costs LOADS! 😬

I have actually had people walk past me many times and say 'oh lovely garden, can you come and do mine?' haha LOL! How about NO. One neighbour was actually serious once.. Well their parents actually. A youngish couple 2 doors down have their parents visit every few weeks. One day Hannah's parents came up to me - and her dad said said 'feel free to do Hannah and Ryan's weeding when you're got 5 minutes, and mow the lawn for them.' 'We can see you love your gardening. They're no gardeners! They'd appreciate it.' This was no 'can you do mine next?' banter. They were serious.

Fucking borderline retired woman trying to maintain a huge corner plot, and the cheeky fuckers want me to do their Millennial son and daughter-in-law's garden for them. LOL fuck off. I half laughed and said 'ooh sorry no - this garden is hard enough work as it is! I love it but would struggle to take on any other gardening work...'

Then I went next door but one shortly after and presented them with a card I'd had dropped through my letterbox 'Dave's gardening services... weeding, lawn-mowing, and other light gardening duties.' SHE (Hannah) said 'I'm not paying anyone to do it!' She looked aghast. I thought 'noooo but you don't wanna do it yourself, you want someone to do it FOR you. Her dad comes around every couple of weeks during the summer to tend to' the garden for them. Cheeky bastards! 😆

I don't know if Hannah or Ryan had asked the dad to ask me, but they must have said something like 'I wonder if she will do our garden, as she appears to enjoy gardening?!' Yeah I do. But only my OWN garden. Like I love my home and I'm quite happy to tidy it and keep it clean, and I'm quite happy to cook meals for my own husband and myself. and I was more than happy to look after my own children. But I don't want to clean other people's houses, cook for other people's husbands, and spend my time looking after other people's children. Good grief! 😆

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This is how I came to gardening. In the 1980s, my grandad was given a prize cup by the Council for the best front garden in one of their houses - he was a machine setter, full-time heavy work, but had chickens, grew veg in his back garden and flowers in the front.

Those of you who might be assuming that gardening needs to look like a Chelsea show garden and requires loads of equipment - it really doesn't (I blame Alan Titchmarsh for this assumption). I get that for some people it's 'housework', but I see weeds growing through pavers and fake grass more than I do in my full on planted garden - or perhaps I am more tolerant of them there!

For full disclosure, I am a passionate amateur gardener, and a member of the RHS. Locally, the front of my house has earned me the name 'the garden lady' and although I am early 50s now, I have been doing this since I was a skint student. It is lovely to see people from my kitchen window stop, look, point, and if I am outside, I get to talk to people and if I can, offer them things they admire (I've given people seed heads and flowers for wedding arrangements, poppy seed heads to small children to grow their own flowers, extras of things that have spread or seedlings I have no space for. Friends and neighbours also get cucumbers and tomatoes when I have a glut. Also, I am lucky, I own a front and back garden, but they are MUCH smaller than any of my grandparents had in council houses.

Gardeners tend to be a generous bunch - with both plants and advice, you will probably find a plant swap for free group in most areas, this has the advantage that they will be plants that thrive in your local conditions, - and if they don't, hey, they were free! There are lots of examples of people transforming back-alleys/ginnels, and abandonned patches with minimal resources to draw inspiration from.

@SabreIsMyFave some EXTREME Cheeky F#%*ery going on there! Flamin Nora……😂

I know right! I didn't know whether to be amused by it, or angry. Truth be told I felt a mix of the two! 😆

Nope, PP stated that our grandmothers had loads more children and less conveniences and still had a nice house and presentable garden. I was pointing out that not all of our grandmothers had those things, my grandmother did not have a nice house, she had an overcrowded flat, and she did not have a presentable garden, she had no garden of any sort.

And no she was not 'well enough' to do those things, she had no option but to do them, and you've no idea of the toll it took on her or the life she led. Just like the 'just buy and plant a few trees!' crowd on this thread have no idea of the lives some of the people who don't do that, are living.

Because people cannot be bothered basically.

I'm retired and enjoy pottering in my garden now. When I was working full time and had a family at home I didn't have the time, money or inclination for gardening. YABU just focus on making your own garden pretty.

Not really what I was saying. I’m sorry that you don’t have access to that. The vast majority of my neighbours do…but they want nice easy gardens to park their posh cars on. And not a bee in sight in their gardens.

Their houses reflect this too. When you look at property on Right Move or wherever (as we do), the soulless gardens devoid of life almost always belong to equally soulless houses. Grey interiors, exactly the same tiled wet room, gadgets everywhere and not a single book in sight. Show homes with no character, all brand new kitchens that look as if nobody has ever cooked anything in them.
This seems to be the future and it is horribly depressing.

Even though my garden is all concrete so I can't really do much out there and I don't enjoy gardening? Is it still good for my MH?

Incidentally I do have some weeds growing over at the side of my garden thanks to next door not doing anything (they grow over from his side). My garden is full of bees. So they clearly like whatever he and I are not doing.

Yes I could but busy doing other stuff. Will get round to it eventually.

Not everyone has much time.