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!!

Also, when have you looked at the house? Because it won't look like those internet pictures now....obviously. Have you seen pictures from when it was in full bloom in summer, or....? 🤔

If you don’t want the work of a garden you also aren’t suitable custodians of a vegetable garden . So don’t set yourselves up to fail on that

Echo others re biodiversity and the destruction to the local ecosystem you will cause by destroying this beautiful garden .

You will do what you have to
do for the benefit of your family , but at least consult a professional gardener first for advice on what to retain .

On the football pitch side of things - kids do grow up and the football pitch will become redundant . At a guess I reckon less than a quarter of your plot would be sufficient.

My parents had a stunning garden but it literally became too much , for years they had a ‘gardener’ in to just run a hedge cutter over everything. So it looked like it was all gone . When they died and whilst I was selling their house I didn’t - the garden came back to life and there was loads of beautiful plants still there . You may find a few years down the line you may have more time for a garden

It sounds you want to move in a quiet area, retired people who pride themselves with beautiful garden and you are going to move, destroy years of creating a spectacular garden to transform it into a play area for your young kids who will inevitably be loud, and extremely annoying. I feel so so sorry for your neighbour.

We've just moved in this sort of road after living in a street full of young noisy kids. It would destroy me and my husband if you moved next to us.

Buy the house.

When you move in remove a few beds to get the lawn you want and live with the rest for a year to see how you feel.

We had a massive lawn for football when kids were young and then put in some beds. If someone was to move in and have a bigger lawn back for their kids I would think it was fine!

I wonder which is worse for the planet, putting in a new kitchen or removing plants from a garden and putting in a lawn. At least you wouldn't be putting down fake grass or concrete for a massive drive.

They will be devastated beyond words and wish with all their hearts they hadn’t sold to you. You know that. Personally, I couldn’t be that mercenary.

Thank you for such a kind response. We would much rather have a smaller, simple garden. However people seem to never want to leave this area as no houses have come on the market. It is weighing up staying in rented wasting money or buying a house with a garden we don't want!

This is actually easier to maintain than a large lawn. Minimal weeding as the plants fill out and prevent them from growing, no lawn to mow and shrubs once - possibly twice - a year.

I know it sounds counter intuitive, but we planted our beds up like this to reduce the amount of work.

As a child our garden was open to the public (we bought it as such, it was the previous owners life's work). When we sold, the new owners flattened it as they didn't like gardening. They paid a huge premium due to the garden but it was theirs to do as they wished. There were some very rare plants though, and huge specialist trees that were on tv, but no tpo's so nothing that could be done

I think it's OK to replace with grass - if you were proposing awful AstroTurf or paving it all over that might be one thing, but I get if you are not prepared to deal with the gardening.

@PatsFishTank makes a good point that it might be worth seeing how it is up maintain as it may be less faff than you fear.

The garden is stunning but that is a very serious gardeners space.
That is a hobby garden.
We had one for 25 years but have massively scaled back over the past two years.

Buy the house if it works for you.
Clearing it will cost you.

You could put it up on a local gardening page that the plants, bushes are free to go.
No doubt the garden would be cleared by grateful gardeners thrilled with the plants.

Good luck.

Yes, exactly. I’ve close planted for the same reason.

In the current housing market, I would think it was a total waste of money pissing about with a garden. I’d save that kind of folly for an upward market. Don’t you have local parks for kids to kick footballs around? You aren’t suggesting astro turf are you? That would be a crime.

I agree.

We have a mature garden from previous owners. Ten years in and apart from trimming stuff it’s easy to maintain. We have kids.

But when we decided to grow some veg… yeah never again!!

I agree with this sorry. Not just because of all the hard work, cost and love that the current owners have put into it, but because of the loss of trees, plants and flowers that our wildlife desperately need in this age of horrible plastic grass and paved gardens. Our garden is a bit wild and overgrown (we also inherited a well established garden when we moved in that we don't have a clue what we are doing with), and seeing all the birds, bees and other insects using the garden as nature intended brings so much joy.

I’m SE too and I pay £180 for 3 people for 3 hours every fortnight during spring and summer and that’s after a huge amount of culling. On top of that, I spend at least one whole day of the weekend in the garden.

I bought the house for an elderly lady and her husband was in the garden all day everyday to stay on top of it. He refused to sell the house because of the garden. She had the house on the market within two weeks of him dying. She showed us around the house with my DC in tow and told us to level the whole garden to make it child friendly because gardens were for playing in. My parents and inlaws are horrified by our culling and always prattling on about biodiversity yet my in laws had nothing in their garden but grass. I suspect my garden does a lot more for biodiversity in its current state than theirs did in the 30 years they have owned their house!

That’s beautiful. Great for kids playing hide and seek!

Have you checked how much they currently pay the gardener? It really might not be as much as you think. We rented a house with a lovely big garden for 6 months when in between selling and buying and a young local lad who was getting into groundkeeping came over once a month and it was extremely affordable.

Also, as pp have said, bear in mind that children playing in the garden is a very short window of time.

And it’s not just a matter of your individual joy, it’s a matter of the future of the planet.

If it’s the kind of area where people stay for a long time, it’s probably also the kind of area where neighbours will judge you for removing the garden. Have you assessed how much the garden adds to the value of the house ? I agree with the poster above that I would feel it was bad karma to destroy something so beautiful.

I love gardening but you are absolutely not being unreasonable. You can do what you want with your own house. Asto turf the lot if you want.

When our (horrible) buyer told us he was going to get rid of the flowerbeds and put gravel everywhere I immedietely starting potting plants up to take with us - they're expensive, and I put a lot of work into them! Definitely offer the plants to the current owners, to be kind.

I would start by getting advice from a gardener. They should be able to tell you which parts are low maintenance and which are more work. Could you make one area clear (ie just grass) for the kids to play, and then maybe have a “nice” (but easy - ie prune once a year) area near the house, and maybe a wilder area down the far end?

If the kids enjoy growing veg you might find that in a few years they’ll do a bit of “gardening” for you (pulling out weeds, light pruning etc).

I’d definitely get advice from someone who knows what they’re talking about, and find out what’s actually involved. A lawn will need to be mowed regularly anyway, so you might find that keeping on top of roses is actually less work!

I think I’d be overwhelmed by that garden too! I second the idea of offering plants on local facebook page if you do get rid of some of it. But it will be quite a lot of work and expensive to lawn it. Our gardens are about 2/3 of an acre and we spend hours just mowing in summer.

When we bought our house, the garden was very manicured with far too many shrubs/trees and a tiny path going through it. We had 3 kids under 6 and it wasn't remotely practical. So we ended up having to cut a load of it all back, fill in a pond, and make a garden that we could put swings/climbing frame into and know the kids were safe out there.

We paid for it and it was ours to do with as we wished.

I have a garden a similar size to what you describe and am in the process of adding flowers etc to the beds now. Regardless of what you have maintaining a garden that size takes time and effort. In some ways beds of flowers like that will be much more straightforward than anything else.

As a PP also pointed out, your kids aren't kids for long. I think in your circumstances I would probably do a halfway house. Take up some of the beds to turf for the kids to play and keep some. A lot of established flower beds will just need pruning and trimming back at the end or start of the season, whereas masses of lawn needs mowing and edging multiple times a month in the summer.

If you don't like gardening and maintenance outside then regardless of what you do with it, is that house really for you? I LOVE being in my garden and learning about my plants and adding, and taking, and pottering, and planting. If you don't get joy from that the question is would you find it an extra stress? Just the size alone is a challenge.