Waterlogged garden

[ApplePieandCustard]

Hi,
Can anyone help me? I have just moved house, and the back garden in my new house has a wooded area behind it. As far as I can tell, water is running from the woods and down into the garden and the lawn is completly waterlogged.
The soil is heavy clay soil, so have a feeling it will dry out in the summer.
I read somewhere that planting a willow tree or hedge would help? Anyone have any ideas?
TIA

since it sounds like there is a slope to your garden, you can put in a 'french drain' we had to put a couple into ours because of similar probs. google it to see what i mean. a willow wouldn't do the trick.

Don't plant a willow unless you have a huge garden and it is far away from your property. The roots extend very far and can cause subsidence problems to houses.
No experience of drainage systems. I believe 'pitchforking' the lawn regularly is a good idea. Adding sand to the clay soil improves the drainage too.

Thanks for the replies.
Will steer clear of willows then, and get digging

I've just had my lawn dug up and had loads and loads of shingle and compost laid and then a new lawn laid as the earth was so clyey and the lawn had tunred into a mud/moss nasty mess. The idea being that the water has somewhere to drain away too now we have so mush shingle mixed in with compost.

we have the same problem. about 2/3 feet down our garden is just solid creamy/grey clay.

i have no idea what to do with it

Same here. We've got clay, which I don't think has been helped by when the builders built the 3 houses 9 years ago in our cul-de-sac (we're the middle one), they used the land as a site office to store their heavy machinery, so the ground got compacted.
So now, where the grass ends and the flower bed starts, there's a permanent lake which runs around the edge of the whole flower bed. And the grass squelches when you walk on it. I've dug compost in every year for the last 2or 3 years, farmyard manure, stuff from the garden centre for breaking down clay and agricultural grit last year. It doesn't work and I'm just resigned to having it as a bog at this time of year and not walking on it. Think the only way to improve it, is to tear the whole lot up and start again.
Hope it'll dry out soon but wish it meant I still didn't have to water it in the summer!