Planting an entire garden from scratch

[FrostHardy]

We moved into a newish house last year and the garden was typical of a new build - poor soil and no living plants at all! We’ve just had 5 planting beds built and filled with tonnes of topsoil and compost. Now I’m looking at a lot of empty space with not too many ideas about how to fill it. I know I’d like to plant a wisteria and some lavender but I’m not sure if it’s even the right time of year to plant them?! I know I can plant bulbs now. Crocus has some ready made borders but I feel that by the time I’ve got my head around it, it’s going to be too cold. Should I just wait until spring to take on the planting?

Google past chelsea flower show gardens, pick one you like and scale it to your space. Then you have a plan and a target to work towards, so you can plug away at it in your own time but get to a coherent design at the end. That is what I would do if I had a blank canvas in a suburban garden.

Sorry i missed the bit that you already had beds built. Ignore.

Concentrate on getting your soil right and ready for planting.
With no ground cover it will lose nutrients and likely get weedy.
You can use a green manure over winter. Look up green manures RHS for info.
This will give you time to research and think things through before planting.
Consider starting with compost bins and a wormery - the compost you have put in will need replacing / topping up over time.

Go around the neighbourhood to see what is growing well and what you like, and copy it.
Consider soil type and how much sun you get when choosing plants / veg.
Consider ornamental edibles and drought tolerant plants.

When planting up beds think of a canopy - putting in 1. a thriller (a wow plant), 2. fillers, and 3. spillers (ground cover and edge softeners).

Hope this helps :)

it is good to plant things now and let them get started before the winter

don't grow wisteria unless you have a massive house or frame for it to grow up - it takes a long time to get started and then likes to grow very big and is too big for most UK houses. if you have an enormous manor house with a pergola, great. but otherwise, give it a miss. A climbing rose is often much better, or a clematis.

think of having some small trees (crab apple is good, and cherry) to give height and shade, maybe against a fence. it is good to plant trees in the autumn

have a few evergreen shrubs to keep things looking interesting all year - variegated holly is nice and gives berries in winter, also sarcococca and camellia

Daphne is a great plant that looks good all year round and has flowers with a lovely scent

Hebe is always a nice compact shrub to fill a space, and Salvia is good for long lasting flowers with a nice scent by a patio

I'd focus on putting in a few big trees / shrubs now so they have time to get settled, and then add flowers in the spring.

It will take a few years to get established so you don't need to rush

Think about the seasons - bulbs give spring colour , but there are 3 other seasons.

Lots of things are best planted in autumn

Think about height - small trees and evergreen shrubs can be a backdrop

If it's a small space having a main colour can bring it together

Think about wildlife and insects - home gardens can do so much for the environment

Do you want to have low maintenance ( so shrubs and bulbs ) ; do you want space for veg; do you like spending lots of time working ( cottage garden style for example )

Look on books ,magazines, web sites for styles you like

I don’t know much about gardening so this could be bad advice, but I would cover with cardboard or mulch or something any bare soil while you make your plan.
I cleared my garden of weeds in stages, but by the time I’d finished the final areas the first bits had new weeds in.

Thanks everyone for the advice. There’s a lot to think about. Focusing on trees and shrubs for now is a good starting point, and good to know I can cover the other beds with green manure while I focus on other bits of the garden. Also thanks for breaking it down into canopy, wow factor and ground cover. This is the sort of advice I need!

The rear wall of the garden faces south and is brick with wood panels. I was planning to grow the wisteria there, but I’m now wondering if it might pull a freestanding wall down eventually? My neighbour has one on the south facing side of her house and it does look set to swallow the house up!

I did plant a few hebe in the smaller front garden 2 weeks ago and have really delighted with visits from bumblebees. It’s been a year of no wildlife at all - no birds or insects, bizarre!

Shrubs and trees now. And just shove some cheap bulbs now to give you something before you get to may and can start planting other things.

You can't go wrong doing that. You can always move the bulbs anyway.

Now is absolutely the right time for planting trees, shrubs and climbers. Bulbs too, but put plant markers in the soil so you know where they are and don't dig them up again by mistake when planting something else!

It is also a good time of year to find reduced perennial herbaceous plants and herbs in garden centres, as they clear out unsold stock. They will be absolutely fine, but are past their best for this year, so garden centres get rid of them cheaply now.

So much fun to plan a garden from scratch. I was able to begin this 3 years ago when we moved to a place that had nothing but dandelions, and a key thing is to be prepared to move shrubs/perennials if they are not thriving - for example the back of the garden is shadier than I had realised so I moved some things further towards the sunshine and found others that liked shade. My basic approach was to list out all my favourite things (within reason) and then work out how to fit them in.

I am about 3yrs on from starting from a blank canvas. I put a lot of effort in early on with planting plans, colour schemes etc but quite a lot of it didn't work out and I now wish I'd put less effort in during the early stages. My recommendation is therefore to go for a bit of a trial approach - get a bunch of different things, that don't necessarily coordinate, and see what works and what doesn't. Once you've worked out the real winner plants that suit your garden and that you really like, you can then focus on propagating them or buying more of the same.

We bought an overgrown, derelict property 2 yrs ago. Other than 1 tree, there was nothing in the garden. This is the 1st summer I've had some raised veg beds, but still have the rest of the garden to do. Gardeners world have a free forum where you can ask questions, send in pics for advice, looks at other plans/ideas etc. Recent discussions — BBC Gardeners' World Magazine (gardenersworld.com)

Do you want to grow any veg or fruit trees? You can buy patio fruit trees which are on dwarf stock and don't grow enormous. Pleached fruit trees can sit almost flat against a fence or wall to maximise space. You rear wall might even grow apricots- depending where in the country you are?

I've bought tulips, daffodils and allium bulbs from aldi, lidl and asda. 2 yrs on, they are all still coming up.

I also keep an eye on the B&M garden centre, supermarket garden sections, B&Q and even regular garden centres. You'll often fine heavily discounted bedding plants. Sometimes they just need a good water!

We have a newly built garden office made with brick and a patio area with very thick oak beams. I was planning on growing a wisteria around the patio part, but also also advised against it. They also advised a climbing rose or clematis instead.

I've been getting bags of free horse manure and keeping them behind the garden office. I plan to let them sit for 6-12mths, then add to the raised beds next year to refresh and add nutrients. BTW- I am a complete amateur gardener, so someone else might correct me and tell me this is wrong 😬

Free, aged horse manure is never wrong! :)

Thanks everyone! After initially feeling a bit overwhelmed I'm back to being excited about a blank canvas. I've bought a couple of shrubs in the crocus 50% off sale - quite a large lilac, lavender, hebe, daphne, choisya and buddleja. I will see how they go and be prepared to move them if I need to. Bulbs seem quite pricey online so I'll trawl the garden centres. I love peonies, it looks as though these should be bought as bare plants?

There must have been lemon balm in the garden at some point because it keeps appearing in between the tiles in the patio area. In the spring I'd like to have an area in the garden for herbs, but I've seen a lot of slugs so I'm not sure how realistic that is!

I'm the same op, we had to take up all our turf because of the issues we were having, I've covered it with manure and now it's covered with membrane to stop any weed growth whilst I get a clue about what we want in there. It's daunting so I'll be following with interest.

Oh lucky you with the lilac. They don’t thrive here (subtropical Australia) but I have put in a buddleja Lochinch which is doing well :)

Ah @Gremlinsateit we lived in Australia for 11 years, I was always amazed at the things I could grow there... until the resident possum razed them to the ground every year! The first pots I put in our UK garden were jasmine - they really bloomed in spring and DS said it reminded him of Halloween in Aus.

We planted a new garden and I used Lucy Bellamy’s book ‘Brilliant and Wild- A garden from scratch in a year’. It was recommended by another poster on here. I love lots of the plants she suggests and the best thing about it is that they all look good together in any combination. The theme is mostly a naturalistic one based mainly on herbaceous perennials, so if you like that look, it might be worth having a look at the book. All we do now is cut everything back in February and it just does it’s thing all year!

If you want a peony or two I, recommend Claire Austin - she specialises in them. She also sells really good perennial plants at reasonable prices, including selections that work together for particular locations. They are small but IMO it's best to buy small as a. If they die you haven't wasted much money and b. They actually establish better.

As previous posters have said, get your soil enriched as your first priority: it really makes a difference.

The mention of Hebes gave me the shudders......

I planted three in my front garden. 15 years later they were 5ft high and 7ft across. We chained them to a landrover to pull the buggers out.

Compact.... no!

Supermarkets all have spring bulbs in now.

Im in the same situation. I've moved into a new house with just gravel outside and one big tree which I love. I've spent the whole summer getting rid of the bindweed infestation and now I'm ready to plant.
This is the ideal time to put in your bare root trees and roses. Every garden should have a Sweet smelling David Austin rose. Any plants put in now will have a great start and will be ready to burst forth in spring.

There are dwarf wisteria cultivars..... Perfect for an obelisk

Primrose Hall Peonies would be an even better bet still as that is literally all they do- it's one of my go to for a wishful thinking browse session sites

Lots of herbs such as thyme are quite tough and slugs don't go for them so much as the easy soft things from experience (actually my job to grow from tiny plugs and we have monster slugs that keep invading the greenhouse)