Help with my new cottage garden

[katem98]

Afternoon all,

We’ve just bought a home with a very well established garden, you can tell the previous owners really took care of their garden and we’d love to maintain and add more to it. Problem is that I have very little knowledge of gardening and all the terminology surrounding it.

My in-laws are very green fingered so will help but would love, if anyone has some spare time, to get your best tips and tricks!

I’d like to create some pretty summer hanging baskets and add lots of colourful flowers to the garden 😊

Huge thanks in advance!

Congrats on your new garden! I would just observe the garden for the first season there, to see what comes up - and add your own hanging baskets, and/or bedding plants where there are gaps, or in pots.

chuck a load of foxglove seed down. Most will take and you'll have masses of flowers in two years' time.

Have you identified plants you already have? Plantnet app is useful for this or post some pics here. I would plant up some pretty pots for this year and then plant them up with bulbs come autumn.

Get your inlaws round, make then a nice cup of tea with cake in the garden and let them advise you. It is very hard to advise properly without seeing it and knowing what you want to do in it.

I agree with people saying to wait a bit. It's very early in the year to get an idea of how the beds will fill out and what colours you will see over the summer/ autumn.
My advice is to learn what the main weeds look like and try to keep it weeded while you observe. Look at where the sunny or shady spots are. When things flower identify what they are, colour, when they flowered. Pay attention to where you instinctively want to walk, even if this is not necessarily where existing paths are.
Make sure you have hoses for watering. Browse gardening books. If you see something you like in others gardens, ask them what it is and look it up.
There's no harm in putting things in pots or hanging baskets while you watch how everything grows in the main beds - but don't get any annuals just yet as it's too early.

Agree with others - if it is a mature garden, there are bound to be loads of perennial plants & shrubs in there which are only just getting going and should flower later in the year.

Arm yourself with these three books: The Flower Expert, The Lawn Expert and the Tree & Shrub Expert, all by DG Hessayon. You can get second-hand copies on Ebay very cheaply. Read them from cover to cover.😁
They contain practically everything you need to find out, and you'll refer back to them for years to come.

Don't rely on plant apps to identify things as they can be wildly inaccurate. Ask your relatives, look in the books, or wander round garden centres until you find things you recognise and look at the names on the labels.

Do this and make notes. I would probably forget half of what they said so the notes should be useful.

Congratulations on the new house and garden