Tips for a clueless new gardener please!

[MavisEnderby]

I have inherited a garden.

The garden was always dps domain.When we bought our house it was a wild tangled overgrown mess.Over the years he transformed it into a lovely garden.

I haven't touched it,really since he died last year.

The winter has taken its toll though.I have just removed a lot of dead plants

I am in the North,the soil is mainly a clay soil

The garden is an L shape,with the foot of the L turfed with borders if that makes sense.

The longer bit is mainly paved with borders on each side.Currently there are mainly small conifers and hardy shrubs.There are also some bulbs,daffodils and tulips.We have some nice creepers that I don't know the name of on the fencing.

Plants that had died have tags-Hebes,ferns,japanese maple trees(small) to name a few.

The lavender hasn't fared well but usually grows loads

We get a lot of slugs and I have a cat which piddles on some plants

What do I plant??

Thanks if you have read all of this:)

I've just spent most of today sorting out my seeds I collected from last year's flowers. Not read all the post so sorry if repeating but if you would like some hardy seeds to sow then email me your address:

[email protected]

and I'll send you some:

Love in a mist - - cottage garden style flowers in pinks, whites and lilacs

Calendula - grows anywhere in all kinds of conditions and loved by butterflies and bees.

Everlasting sweet peas - a great climber with beautiful fragrant flowers

Cornflowers in blue and claret

Poppies - oriental, lilac double headed po pom and common yellow and orange ones

Buddhlea - (butterfly bush) - as they love them - very hardy and come in white, purple, fushcia - grow quite tall - about 6' and with a wide spread

you can have some chives too - these have survived -16 up here in Scotland.

You can just sprinkle them where you want them or grow in pots and transplant when you want to.

Good luck and you'll find solace in the garden - especially with a cheeky wee pinot grigio to help you along .

Why don't you get a catalogue such as J Parker or Thomson and Morgan- it may give you ideas on what to plant

I'm sorry to hear about your dh.

I too inherited a garden, four years ago. The previous occupants were insane gardeners, out all the time, in all weathers. I'm, er, not. It's also ginormous, like a freaking park, which is lovely, but the reality of looking after it is not so lovely.

Anyway, in four years I've done very little because I just DO NOT UNDERSTAND GARDENING. I wish I did but it's like a foreign language to me (must say, I've probably learned more about gardening reading this thread than all the books I own). But also it's probably because I'm not madly interested at this point in my life.

The point of this is that despite having done very little, the garden lives on. So by all means get going on it, but if you don't manage to do everything, don't fret.

I do plan to take pics of it this year (cos I forget what's growing where in the winter) and have a plan for it...really I do...good luck.

I don't think I've said it on this thread but, based on my own experience when new to gardening, my top tips would be

Join a local gardening society - they're often the best source of cheap gardening supplies, plants and advice tailored to local circumstances

Use the Royal Horticultural Society website for reliable, free advice from the comfort of your sofa - this is the advice page for lawns, for example.

LadybirdLorax is right - there are not many plants that will die from neglect and most will be fine if left to their own devices for a while. It may just make dealing with the jungle a little harder when you do get round to it.

If you are thinking of planting some new things I really recommend the RHS book Plants for Places. It is divided into sections - plants for damp shade/dry shade/clay soil/exposed site etc etc so you can look at your garden and see what would work well where. I wish I was near you - I'd pop round and have a look. I absolutely love my garden - I'm not an expert, just an enthusiast and I find it the most soothing, relaxing way of spending time. I truly hope your garden helps you to heal.

If you want easy maintenance, try putting in some variagated euonymus. Evergreen shrub that really just needs trimming back once a year. They often have them at a good price in B & Q. The gold and green ones (like emerald n gold) give a lovely splash of warm gold in a border. you could use things like this for structure and then plant more flowery things in-between. different varieties grow to different sizes.

www.google.co.uk/images?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&channel=s&hl=en&q=variegated+euonymus&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=univ&sa=X&ei=JqeQTaG-AsqHhQeb6-G7Dg&ved=0CD8QsAQ&biw=1260&bih=678

Hyacinths will come back again next year if you plant the bulbs in the ground once they have finished flowering.

Aldi have lots of good gardening offers on at the moment. I got 8kg of organic pelleted fertilizer for £6.

Do try and feed your beds with something ( home-made compost, well rotted horse manure (if you have a stables nearby) or pelleted feed). Try to do this at least once or twice a year.

Put a bit of feed in plant holes before planting and water in any new plants well.

I find planting bulbs that come up year after year a good investment of time.
In autumn plant snowdrops, daffodils, tulips, bluebells, muscari, anemones, dutch irises and hyacinths for spring colour. gladioli, lillies, nerines are good for summer until early autumn. I love plant sales at fetes etc I got a load of cosmos and geraniums last year and they flowered from summer to late autumn and only died off when the frost got to them. For lazy foolproof growing flowers from seeds I'd recommend nasturtiums,sweetpeas, morning glories and giant sunflowers. I also grow rainbow swiss chard in amongst my flowers as the stalks are beautiful flowers and you can eat the whole thing like spinach. Get the kids out to help they love getting their hands dirty!

If you have any spare cash, consider hiring a gardener. They only need to come every week or two for a few hours to keep the place under control and, if you get chatting, they'll give you a few tips on what to plant and how to care for things. A simple card in the newsagent's window might get you an enthusiastic retired type. My mum's neighbour did this after her husband sadly died. She now does most of the work herself but has kept on her new recruit because they get on so well

I have a garden which obviously used to belong to a real gardener - raised vegetable beds, shrubberies, borders, the lot! Sadly the house had been rented for about 5 years since him, before we got it, and the plants have got very overgrown or just taken over, where they should have been looked after. It's hard now seeing how they are meant to go.

That's why I think it would probably be a good idea to keep the proportions of everything the same as they are now, if you can get around to a bit of cutting back! (I think experts call it pruning?! there are probably good and bad times to do things, but hey. personally I just get going with hedge cutter and hope it will regrow)

The only things I try to do every week are:
cutting the lawn
trimming the front hedge cos otherwise the neighbours glare
viciously pulling out new bramble shoots, and any signs of bindweed or goosegrass. (I've got quite good at recognising them!)

In the veg bed I have a lot of strawberry plants I got last year free from some offer in the papers (found on Moneysavingexpert quick grabbit column)
i thought they would die in the winter but there seem to be some new ones. There are also some escaped raspberries from next door's patch.

I have given up on most new plants as they invariably die on me, but if I was doing a memorial I might think about a nicely named rose, like a David Austen one? Roses are pretty tough - we have one which grew up through the concrete of our new outbuilding, in spite of having been razed to the ground! - and the flowers are lovely. You could maybe get a June flowering one?

Good luck and I hope it gives you somewhere lovely to sit and contemplate.

Mavis, some great advice here. I'd only add that the BBC gardening website is also very good for general tips, and has a 'what to do today'-style section which can be helpful. It's here - and you can watch 'Gardeners' World' on there too, though Monty Don's gorgeous massive garden always makes me

Why not plant some easy veg? There's nothing like growing food to spark an interest in gardening, I find! Even a few salad leaves in a pot or planter would be a start, and they come up amazingly quickly. No need for anything complicated. French and runner beans can be lovely to look at, not at all out of place in a flower garden, and you can just push the seeds into the soil (when things have warmed up a bit, in a month or so) and pretty much leave them to their own devices.

Mavis lots of great advice here.

I am really sorry about your DP. Carrying on with the garden he loved sounds like such a good way to remember him.

I love gardening, and have done since I had ten pots outside a council flat in London. At last now I have a proper garden, when we bought this house the garden was horrible but we managed to get money together and tear out all the paving stones, concrete, gravel and put in a lawn and a nice patio. DD loves it and will go out in all weathers with her friends - it's such a great resource for her. We put in quite a big patio mainly for sitting out on and for the rotary drier - the main user turned out to be DD who draws all over it with her chalks.

Gardening will grow on you (tee hee!). Just go out and dig around, plant things, grow seeds, make mistakes - it doesn't matter because you and the kids will enjoy yourselves in the fresh air.

You can get natural predators for slugs which are child-friendly at The Green Gardener.

I really enjoy Robin Lane Fox's gardening column in The FT Weekend newspaper on Saturdays. He is a curmudgeonly crusted old Tory, his knowledge about plants and gardening is top class, even if he did predict that as a blue flower called Tory something was doing well just before the election Cameron might storm in. (He never did reply to my email asking if the plant in question could be grown in a hanging basket!)

Good luck and enjoy!

Wow, Mavis, I'm so impressed by how you are coping with everything !
I wish I had your energy
I think I'll have to look out for some hanging baskets at those garden fetes, all we've got, apart from a pond and some apple trees, is a pot of daffodils on the front doorstep !

Thank you all for the lovely tips

The plants that died are all not very hardy. OK for a normal UK winter but not up to the last 2 we've had. Everyone has lost maples, Eucalyptus and hebes. Lavender hates it's roots being wet so doesn't work well in clay soils (which don't drain well) or wet winters...

If you want levnder either stick them in pots with lots of sand and grit as well as John Innes soil based compost. Or dig them up and replant them with loads of grit etc in the hole...

If you want hardy things that will survive our grotty weather I would recommend perrenials that are native to the UK.

Some of my favourites are:
Phlox
Campanulas
Cat Mint
geraniums (not the red ones you grow in window boxes but ones like Johnsons Blue)
All of these are native to britain, don;t get eaten by slugs and pests and can handle your soil. they all come in LOADS of varieties and colours and should be easy to get from any decent garden centre.

I hope that helps...