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!!

Your title says rip so we can assume that was your thought process. Unless you were just click baiting? I think titles matter.

It's your legal right to do so, OP, but I hope you don't!

It is indeed a stunning garden, created by people with extraordinary talent and dedication.

I know you can do as you wish but I hope you'll find another house. I do get annoyed when people buy, say, a lovely house and then change it out of recognition - if they wanted a super-modern home, why did they buy that Georgian or Victorian one???

@caringcarer That's such a terrible shame. I hope it's a comfort to you and your sister to know how much your mum enjoyed her beautiful garden. I bet you have so many memories of her there amongst her roses and hopefully lots of photos too.

Yes, half means half. That's a huge amount of garden to rip out.
I still think that you are operating from a position of gardening ignorance and don't appreciate that (a) what you have isn't necessarily that time consuming and (b) what you are proposing will be expensive and may be even more work!

I would suggest that, rather than have grass surrounded by borders which will get smashed by footballs, you would be better off having a 'near' garden (as is) and a 'further away from the house' area devoted to grass. As I said earlier, you need to concentrate on design, not "flowers". You keep mentioning "flowers" but a garden is more than flowers.

I am sure a genuine question about improving parts of the garden for your young family would have attracted plenty of replies from us keen gardeners who would happily have given constructive tips on how to manage the borders whilst making space for play.

The whole thread's been a great example of how many people really care about gardens and nature though so I'm glad to have seen it and taken part in the discussion.

I'm in team 'immerse your children in nature and have fun' camp. So a bit of lawn a bit of plants and a lot of wildlife sounds the perfect balance.

I hope you soon find a home that meets all your families needs now and in the future.

If you can’t look after roses then you certainly wont have time to do veg trust me!

How old are your DC? They grow up fast - mine are teens and although I’ve done nothijg with our garden since we moved in ten years ago I now have more time so im putting a bit of time into making it look nice. I’m no gardener though.

With all that space you have room for grass for playing football on, a veg patch, a wild flower garden with shrubs and plants that attract butterflies, a herb corner, flower borders close to a nice area for sitting and enjoying your garden. I'd make room for DC to plant sunflowers too. You can create zones in a large garden. I have a large garden and have a large cricket net running the length of it, but I still have a corner for fruit trees, rhubarb and raspberry bushes, another corner for the BBQ, a shed in the third corner, borders stocked with flowering shrubs and dwarf trees and ornamental grasses with a few flowers that grow at the front. The centre zone of my garden is grass and the final corner has a table and chairs and a couple of sun loungers. We have to be wary of stray cricket balls though. Most people say you shouldn't rip out a garden for the first year. That way you can see what you have and decide what you like.

so do I! and I think there would have been more usueful answers without the clickbait!

I think I might start a thread entitled ‘AIBU to rodger the next door neighbour in the bushes?’ about whether I should invite him round for a cup of tea and to admire my topiary!

You are the one posting "AIBU to rip out a beautiful garden" just because you want a house in this particular area. I think buying a property with an established and beautiful garden when you can't appreciate it and care for it is dispicable. It's like buying a period property on a street you like and ripping out the original features until it looks like a modern new build. Your neighbours will hate you.

Our garden is about half an acre, of which half is grass. Keeping the grass tidy is a lot of work in itself, even if you let some grow long, as we have, for wildlife. Getting someone in to cut it is very expensive. Bigger gardens mean work and/or expense whatever you do with them.I love mine though.

Absolutely this! OP made it sound as though diggers were moving in on completion day 🤣 which is why the majority of posters were horrified at the waste.

Actually a quick Google search would have shown you that the rural fox population has dropped 48% since 1995. Since fox hunting was banned landowners have started a more manged shooting approach plus road fatalities account for many deaths and environmental factors (increase in mange & loss of habitat) plus loss of food sources/fewer rabbits are all factors. I love wildlife so of course I'd rather see healthy foxes in the countryside but sadly humans have forced them out of their natural homes and made them an issue for rural areas instead.

Can I ask what part made it sound like this?

A vegetable garden needs consistent attention.

Yanbu
It would be your house, buy the house.

We’ve completely re landscaped our garden and it’s much better for us, beautiful but simple.

the title of your post

I'm guessing it's the "rip out" bit. They've read that, seen the photos, and assumed you are about to launch an attack on sissinghurst with diggers and glyphosate without, you know, actually reading what you wrote. That's Aibu for you.
OTOH, I've never seen such an active gardening thread😂

If they know the buyers plan to rip up the garden, they may not sell to them, I'd keep quiet about it.

“Rip out”.

Am guessing the title might have been a suggested/AI induced one. Seen a few posters fall foul of only reading the headlines, as it were.

Lesson to us all to edit those/compose our own if starting a thread.

I think if you do get rid of the roses especially, please try to find out what kind they are and offer them to local rose enthusiasts. Some breeds of rose are no longer sold, and they can be hard to establish from cuttings even.
if you do get a list feel free to DM me and I can see if I can help you get homes for them.

Think of the wildlife. This would be tragic.

Please, please listen to the gardeners and everyone else on this thread who have advised you that an established garden is much more low maintenance than you'd think.
My mate is totally ignorant about gardening. He bought a house with a gorgeous established garden and ripped out all the beautiful grasses, perennials and hardy geraniums that were in there because he had no idea what they were. They all went in his brown bin. I was fucking horrified - mostly because I would have taken them all off his hands and found space for them somewhere in mine.
He's now spending hundreds putting plants back in the bare areas because it looked so bad. Except he's bunging in annuals which he will need to replace each year. He's spending more time and money now than if he'd left it and did basic maintenance.
I hate the enshittification of things.There was an absolutely beautiful twenties house near me that has been savaged and is now an instafucked fake wood clad box with dark grey plastic windows. I hate to think what has happened to the inside and the gardens. It very much reminds me of the thread on here where someone had done similar to a mid-century bungalow and wondered why it wasn't selling...