How long did it take you to create a decent DIY garden

[aliumbear]

If your garden didn't have anything in it to begin with, and you're not well off, then honestly how long did it take you to fill out your garden with plants and make it half decent doing it yourself? Assuming you haven't paid someone to do landscaping or put landscaping stones down and made virtually everything artificial. AIBU to judge someone with an artificial hedge etc.

Work in progress still 19 years on.

20+ years, with lots of changes enroute to what we've got now

It's taken me 4 years but obviously still a work in progress as a garden is never done.

The owner before inherited the house but it took 4 years of legal stuff for him to actually get the house to sell. In those years he'd put down gravel or membrane almost everywhere to suppress plant growth. I moved in and most beds empty or covered in gravel. It's been a lot of work moving gravel and acquiring plants. Also discovering plants that were already there but hadn't been able to grow. It's worth it, but has been very hard work and I have spent money on plants.

A garden is never finished, but 10 years or so should get you something liveable with.

40 years and counting. 😁

Things grow, they die, they change all the time. Nature is as nature does. A garden is never finished.

I started from scratch 6 years ago. I got lots of cuttings from friends, and divisions of perennials, kept an eye on local facebook pages for plant giveaways and got several trees ( acers in pots, a bay) and shrubs that way or very cheap.

i had to buy in topsoil. It’s a really established garden now.

I’m at 5 and pretty happy with the “cheap” parts. This year will build a border out of scrap wood and add a few containers. Three big projects left are raised beds along the back and a rock garden on the other but those will be really pricy

Mine is a work in progress, but as I'm only four years in, I feel an absolute novice compared to PPs! It's taken a lot of experimentation, money and recent research into vine weevils and other pests so far. I try to encourage pollinators to my garden, so I buy a lot of plants for them. As I'd love to grow more of my own fruit and vegetables, improving the soil with a lot of compost and manure is a big priority for me.

Mine was just lawn when we got it. 2 years in and it looks much more interesting but the trees and shrubs are still small and spindley.
Already in year 2 the ornamental grasses and perennials look much better. The bulbs were brilliant.
I know its going to look so much better in the next few years. Having to learn lots of patience and restraint.

When we bought ours it was really really overgrown with a huge lump of spreading Bamboo, so almost everything had to be dug up. We're at 8 years now and have added a new patio, and some fruit trees we planted have grown to a good height, and there are lots of mature shrubs. However, I'm spent loads on plants as well as growing stuff ourselves and if we were staying longer (were preparing to move) i would be changing some of it to best use the space/light/what grows where. Leaving all my lovely plants is a wrench!

I'm on my 5th spring/summer, and started with 80% weedy lawn and 20% ivy - now 40% wildlife friendly semi-lawn and 60% plant beds. It's getting there, but I still have bare patches. With hindsight I should have put in more perennials and small trees/shrubs early on, it would have looked nicer by year 3 or 4. As others have said, it'll never be done if you enjoy the process.

Being on a low budget can definitely be done, but you have to be savvy. The main cost to me has been improving the heavy clay soil with manure/soil improver/woodchip, so check what your soil is like. Be on the lookout for street finds, I found a bench and a potted tree that way. Spread the word to your friends/family/colleagues that you're looking for plants/furniture/pots/raised beds/bamboo canes/seed. Find out if there's a local gardeners group, I'm in a WhatsApp group for a community garden, and in a Facebook one. Fb marketplace can be good. Some councils give away small trees and bulbs in autumn or winter. There is a recycling project near me that sells cheap paint and scaffolding. Find the discount sticker area in the garden centre (B&Q is good on Tue/Wed) for 50% off. Ask people doing tree work outside your house for woodchip in exchange for a cuppa.

YANBU to judge plastic gardens, I think many of us here on the gardening topic do 😁 it's not even low maintenance, it just gets uglier over time as it deteriorates in the sun.

A rockery doesn't have to be expensive. We did this one using broken up concrete slabs that had been lining the pathway between raised beds the last time we "reorganised" our garden.

Our house was a new build we bought new 14 years ago. It had a turf lawn we laid & that was it. We put a few plants in including a cherry tree sapling but that was it for several years.
I really started work on it during lockdown, so 6 years & its looking really good now, full of plants.
Some things have thrived, others have died or no longer work in the space of what I want & have been removed. So it’s still a work in progress, but it’s really lovely.
Plants have been the biggest cost, but I focus on perennials so I’m not replacing every year & have mostly bought them in the reduced sections of garden centres or from plant sales. I’ve also accepted wildlife self seeding if I like them.
My focus is now a wildlife garden, focusing on providing food plants for wildlife, I’ve moved & extended beds & our next project will be a wildlife pond.

We are on year 4 of doing our garden and DH and I are doing everything ourselves. Its mostly all been done now but always have to keep doing things in a garden. Ours wasn't empty, had been owned by a great gardener but they had reached 95 and not been able to do anything for years so all overgrown and we had to redo almost all. We are not especially on a budget but a lot of it is just doing work. Bulbs are good value and pretty easy if on a budget. I always get everything from RHS or Crocus and they aren't the cheapest but always good quality and beautiful plants. Depends how big garden is and how often you'll be out there. I would just start and see how you get on. For us we did 3 times a week a few hours each time when BST and in the winter once a week. First year was mainly clearing what was there and going through all of garden. Second year planting lots of plants and bulbs, weeding etc, clearing leaves. Third year re did all the turf by ourselves and more plants and bulbs, clearing leaves. Fourth year just started done 3 paths and more plants and bulbs, clearing leaves.

I think it depends a bit on which direction your garden faces, how much sun it gets, how good the soil quality is etc. My front garden is south facing and gets full sun for most of the day, a lot of things seem to grow in it extremely quickly. I bought a little lavender for £10 from B&Q two years ago and it's gone absolutely crazy, it's huge now and I have to keep cutting it back. I also bought a little musk mallow for £1.99, just a very small pot, two years on and it's jostling for space with the lavender. They have both gone nuts. So sometimes if you research hardy native species you can get very lucky with pretty cheap plants.

My back garden is north facing and it's a bit more tricky to get things growing in it. It wasn't at all empty when we moved in, the previous owners had done a lot so I wasn't starting from scratch. We used some wildflower seeds bombs though, they have been really successful despite the lack of sunlight, and I've had a lot of luck with bulb selection packs too. They're pretty cheap and if you get a mixture of bulbs you can have different things popping up from Feb all though the spring and summer.

I do have to resist the temptation to just buy random things from the garden centre because if they don't suit the garden you've got they just won't grow. Research hardy, quick growing, low maintenance species that suit the amount of sun in your garden and you should hopefully be able to get it looking much more interesting in a couple of years.

We had a pretty good garden when we moved in. In ten years most of the wooden features have decayed so it needs attention. Some old railway sleepers hang on, because they are probably bathed in something I really don't want to know about. Our front garden is a triumph though, it's only small, about 3x3m or something, and we were over zealous when planting. Probably about one week in the making. Everything grew, supports so much wildlife, only it does need thinning from time to time. It's just a few shrubs and hardy perennials, and you can go a long way with that type of planting. It's also low maintenance.

Also I think it depends what kind of garden you want. A natural, wildflower-style garden can look really established and abundant quite quickly and cheaply compared to a more manicured, tidy look. Wildflower seed mixes are very cheap, and if you scatter them in the right conditions you can go from bare soil to something that looks pretty but wild within a single season. Native wildflowers are also obviously well suited to the local climate and soil, so they tend to just get on with it without much help.

Whereas if you go for a more formal look with specimen shrubs etc, those plants can be slow to establish, more expensive to buy, more fussy about conditions, more hit and miss so I think you have to experiment a bit more and be prepared for some things not to work.

I wouldn't judge anyone with an artificial hedge, I don't want one myself but my garden wouldn't be everyone's cup of tea either.

I started with nothing but concrete slabs (small city garden) and very little money five years ago. We pulled up enough slabs to make two beds and built a raised bed (one bed per year, so a really slow process, but also cheap). Under the slabs was sand and hardcore, and then compacted clay with no insects in it, completely inert. I got bags of compost, manure and some topsoil from Lidl and a local farmer and dug it into the clay and managed to get enough soil to plant in. I bought plants in batches, maybe £100-worth every spring/when we had made a bed, always perennials. A lot of things died, others survived. Climbing roses, honeysuckle, erysimum Bowles mauve, Libertia grandiflora, rock soapwort have all gone mad and are huge now. Lots of cheap bulbs from tesco and a £1 clematis from Aldi have done really well. The roses were £30 each from David Austin and I have two. Verbena did beautifully for four years but seems to have died, sadly. I get no direct light in winter so sometimes things look good for a season or two but don’t come back even though they should. However, I’ve got a long way to go yet but I did think this morning that the garden is very different to when I moved in - it’s alive and full of bees.

@MaryLennoxsScowl However, I’ve got a long way to go yet but I did think this morning that the garden is very different to when I moved in - it’s alive and full of bees.

That's such a lovely way of putting it. Mine started out as bare concrete and a bit of decking. When we finally moved 1- years later there were bees, birds nesting in the honeysuckle, birds regularly coming in to get the berries from the mountain ash. It felt so alive sitting there in summer.

After 15 years, mine's not so much a garden as a graveyard for expensive garden centre purchases. RIP.

12 years in the making! I moved into a new build so I had a big patch of earth! In year 1-2 I paid pathways and patio and borders, Year 5 I put in some decking and made the borders more prominent and bigger and the rest as just been experiment in with plants and bulbs. Some things work, other things don't but I'm pretty happy with how it is. It is pretty right now with Wisteria, Irises and Geums doing their thing. It does need some general attention, digging/weeding, etc.

Please don't go artificial!

I think you can start to make improvements straight away, and in two or three years even better. The main thing is to manage expectations and build up gradually, and as PPs have said, it never stops.

Local fetes/markets are good for plants, places like Aldi and B&M for planters and features.

There's lots of useful tips on SM. I found this guy very inspirational, especially how he started with no clue and one plant, although you don't have to go as far as he did to make a difference.

Mine was just a lawn and a few trees when we moved in 18 months ago - no flower beds.

My advice would be to have a vague plan of what you want to do, taking into account which areas get the sun. And then focus on one small area at a time.

I dug flower beds and filled them up with cheap and spready things like forget me nots, alchemilla mollis, thyme so the beds weren’t empty. And then I gradually added in more plants.

It is expensive so try annuals that you can grow from seed while you’re deciding your longer term planting. Buy lots of small plug plants online, look out for local plant sales.

I also think a garden is never finished, but we spent six a half years creating our last one and - whilst there were still a few wild areas - it did resemble a proper cottage garden when we sold in 2024.

When we purchased the house the EA described the (0.5 acre) outside space as "magical", by which they meant it was a weed-infested jungle with a 60' fallen beech tree laying across the centre!

There were a few lovely features - a grade 2 listed partial boundary wall (the house itself wasn't listed), a leat dating from when the house was a mill, more huge trees (beech and oak) along the front boundary, and an ancient apple plus a fabulous mature acer we failed to spot when viewing the house as it was the depths of Winter. But the house had been repossessed and uninhabited for ages, before which it was a rental for a while, so the garden hadn't been cared for.

Despite all this it was on the Historic Parks and Gardens register for Wales!

A tree surgeon we befriended cut the fallen tree into huge 'slices' which we dried out and chopped into logs for our two wood burners.
We cleared the weeds by hand, hoping to find some plants worthy of saving, but apart from the acer, plus another smaller one, loads of laurels, a couple of perennials and some holly, there was nothing.

We made some expensive mistakes initially as the conditions were challenging (30+ box balls, 70+ alliums, 25+ lavenders all died within the first year). But we'd brought lots of plants in pots from our previous house and most of these survived when planted out.

Gradually we dug out beds, adding tons of shrubs and perennials as well as 60+ David Austin roses. We planted more fruit trees to make a small orchard. I removed a large patio near the front door and reused the slabs to create paths through and around the four rose beds. Tons of gravel was added to make further paths and some bricks reclaimed from a wall we removed inside were used to make a circular seating area to survey our efforts.

There was also a walled courtyard which we tackled before anything inside or out, building raised veg beds from oak sleepers. This became our little oasis - somewhere to escape to when the internal (DIY) renovations got us down. By the time we sold, the garden was actually quite magical, but now we're starting again with a paved seaside courtyard in England 🙄😆