AIBU to rip out a beautiful garden in potential house?

[Mum2HC]

Looking at new house - only one we like. Owner is an older couple who have spent years creating a garden worthy of an National Trust property!! The issue is we do not enjoy gardening and do not want to have to pay a gardener to keep all the flowers in check. Would it be awful to take out half the gardens flowers and replace with grass? It is 0.8 acre so a very big garden and our children would much prefer all turf to play football etc. It would feel almost criminal to do it but we don't want the upkeep - they also have a large rose garden which we would rather take out and have a vegetable garden. Is this all just too much?! It is the only house we like in our ideal location. It must be a full time job to look after it!!

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

@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

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

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.

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

Good though!

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.

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!

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???

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.

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.

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

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

Content that this was apparently some kind of blind, deaf and particularly stupid sheep, she could now manage the robot by smacking it if it got too close to the creek bed or fence for her liking, and was eventually content to sit on the highest point of the field and Supervise (TM) it.

“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.”

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.

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.

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

Roses are easier than vegetables...

Why does the DH have to mow?

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.

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.

Nooooooo😮

😂

Of course you have every right to do what you want with the garden if you buy the house. And I'm pleased that you are talking about replacing it with a low maintenance option rather than putting down astro turf or chippings or slabs which sadly is what a lot of people do.

However having seen your photo of what the existing garden looks like i would find it sad. I'm a keen gardener and generally when we have moved home we have bought a house with bare and undeveloped gardens and it has been my hobby to make these gardens beautiful. And I've succeeded to the point where when we have sold the property again the garden has been the feature which estate agents have focused on. I've made a point never to go back to a home I've moved out of because I know whoever bought the house would do something similar to your plans OP, or much worse. But of course that is their entitlement as the new owners

We have family members who have had their house on the market for a really long time, desperate to sell and downsize. They have an enormous and beautiful garden that takes a significant amount of work for them and a team of gardeners a few times a year. They would be horrified if they thought people were avoiding buying their house because they were worried about changing the garden! I would definitely offer them to take anything they can with them or give away to others but then I would just change the garden to the way that suits you and your family! Good luck, it sounds lovely and how amazing for your kids to have a big garden to play in

@Oranesandlemons According to agents we use large, labour intensive gardens do indeed put people off, big time. Your family members gorgeous garden may well be slowing the sale.

Same agents say it’s usually maintenance of the outside space that triggers the desire to downsize, more than maintaining to house, with obvious exceptions such as a multi storied town house having too many stairs as mobility declines

The house and garden need to suit the needs of the inhabitants and these needs evolve

Grass isn't exactly low maintenance and it's TERRIBLE for local insects and wildlife.

YABU.