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!!

Beautiful gardens aren't always great for wildlife. Sometimes they are overcultivated - perhaps you could look at having wildflower meadow mix seeded in with the grass? And putting in native plants which look after themselves to help with the insect life? Part of my garden (which is tiny) is down to meadowsweet, rowan, valerian, nettle - stuff like that which you don't have to do anything with, you can mow down at the end of the season, but the insects love it!

And put in a buddleia. Unkillable and great.

I would see if they can take any away with then, and also put a call out on Facebook or a local group have gardeners come in and take what they want - rose bushes etc are expensive

Yes, this is how ours works now. DH has been happy to do the pruning/end of year ‘closing down the garden’ but has agreed to get a man in for the next few years as it really is only a couple of days work with a reasonably experienced gardener and an assistant.

As some PP said I think your kids would actually love a garden like that. Many of the things that stick in my mind from childhood are playing in peoples large gardens (and I don't mean kicking a football about) but making mud pies, hide and seek, secret meetings in nooks etc. I also used to love going round large gardens with my parents and day dreaming about having a life like a character from Pride and Prejudice/ The Secret Garden etc etc. If you can't spend the time gardening let it grow a bit wild. But as the gardener up thread said you could just pay for a tidy up a couple of times a year and the money it would cost to pull it all out would cover that for a considerable length of time.

Then please just accept that it's not the right place for you, and look elsewhere.

I'm sure you'll find something more in your line before long.

It's painful isn't it? I recently looked online at parents old Sussex home on street view. All of mums beautiful work has gone, they've poured grey concrete all over what was the back garden, down the side and out the front. It's so ugly and just horrible for supporting our suffering wildlife.

Yes, but i think OP is talking about planting a few seeds with the kids, watching them grow (so the kids understand the growth cycle) and the kids having the satisfaction of eating what they grew from a tiny seed, not full on allotmenteering!!

Oh gosh, having seen the photos, please buy elsewhere and let this place go to someone who will look after it.

🎯

Doing that would be just wrong. Don't buy the house.

If I were you, I’d buy the house and live with the garden for a year. I’m never a fan of knee-jerk reactions and you might regret ‘ripping out’ the garden, if you’re too hasty. Is there an area of lawn which would lend itself to being slightly enlarged for the dc to kick a ball around in the short term? If your garden is anything like the one you have posted photos of, I think your dc might love it just how it is - what a wonderful thing to be able to enjoy nature in their own backyard! Have you watched the David Attenborough ‘Secret Garden’ series? Very inspiring! Of course you may want to make changes, and that’s your decision, but I’d advise doing it slowly, with lots of consideration, rather than ripping it out in a panic!

If they loved the house and the garden so much then they wouldn’t be selling it. You can’t sell something and expect to retain some sort of stewardship over it. Buy the house and make the changes required for your own family and circumstances.

Please read this very carefully @Mum2HC. Destroying that garden would be an act of vandalism and create more work for you.

If the garden doesn’t work for you it’s the wrong house.

I do think as a race we humans are heading to the Derennaissance.

I wish people would stop saying it’s no different to ripping out a kitchen you don’t like, when you rip out a kitchen you are not destroying the habitat of birds, bees and insects who rely on that garden to live, personally I couldn’t live with guilt of doing that.

I have had to sell a house I utterly loved. People move for all sorts of reasons. People die and the house is a probate house.
They do not put that much love into a garden and move because they don’t love it. There will be a reason, but that garden ( and I suspect home) has been loved.

I've just been working on a garden where the owners did just this.
They had an open weekend where people came to take plants 'free to collector'.

They gave away probably £5,000 worth of established plants.

The garden I arrived at on the Monday morning looked like the Somme. No bird sang. It was a dreadful sight.

They are having a sunken seating are surrounded by 'native flowers for wildlife'.

The landscapers are costing them about £18,000. I'm costing them £4,000.

*also, an established rose garden is a lot less work than a vegetable garden which is a huge amount of work!

And a lot less work than a lawn as well.

It would be ok to change it, but don't underestimate the amount of work or expenses it might still be. Even turning it over to lawn and keeping on top of that would be a massive undertaking. Also take a look at any fences you'd own and calculate how much they cost in upkeep/replacement.

If you're going to take it on maybe think bigger than just lawn. Massive climbing frame, tennis court, garden room. All less maintenance than a lawn that needs weekly mowing.

I would worry what lessons you are teaching your children too.
By wrenching it up.
I suppose they would learn you don’t have to value beauty. Nature. Things other people care about. So long as you want to do it then crack on.

We have also bought a house with a bigger garden than we expected. Although we plan to get into gardening, we've done little with it so far. Just let it get overgrown. It looks so much nicer than it did when it was manicured. Let the bushes fight it out for space. The healthy ones will enjoy being left alone. If they've put in something that needs a different soil type from what they have and so needs specific liquid fertiliser to thrive.... it was a poor choice on their part, let it die. There may be one or two of those but not many.

Former owner here had a gardener. To my taste, the garden looks so much nicer now we've left it alone. Bushes and trees have grown into natural shapes, not manicured artificial ones.

Yes we've done the odd bit of pruning. That is totally manageable. And we're learning what's what and what we like, and will make some changes down the line.

If there are big patches of flowerbed that are currently full of annual flowers rather than perrenial shrubs, then next spring you and your kids can sprinkle on lots of wildflower seeds (cheap, do not need starting indoors then planting out, attract butterflies) and see what comes up. This is a nice thing to do with children. And very easy.

Totally fair to put in a patch of grass for your kids but if you didn't want a garden this big in the first place I don't see why you need a patch of grass big enough to cover this whole garden.

Find another house. It would be so wrong to rip out such a beautiful garden.

Of course you can do what you want with your own house, were you to own it.

Of course people on here will think it's criminal to rip out such a beautiful garden.

Not sure what you wanted from this thread?

I would love that garden 😍 I’m not a good gardener but like to give it a go. I’d be out there all the time but my kids are grown now so I would have the time and the inclination.

In your similar set up could you donate some plants rather than destroy them, which would be 😱😢

You’ll be destroying a lifetimes work - something else will come up within the next couple of months it’ll suit you far better