A Little Look At Our Small Garden
Probably the most DIYed of all jobs in our home!
I’ll be honest, I am terrible at gardening. I enjoy it but I am not green-fingered in any way. I am too impatient to wait for certain months to sew, I have no idea how you ‘propagate’ (or even what that actually means), I don’t have a greenhouse or any tools that weren’t bought as a novelty set from Wilko. I honestly don’t believe you have to be good at gardening to get enjoyment out of it and I also think there’s a lot of gatekeeping and general judgment in the gardening world (heaven forbid I use an abbreviation of a plant and not the latin name on Instagram - I will be corrected). I have an allotment which looks like an overgrown weed patch currently but I am learning a lot about myself.
I strive for perfection in most of my hobbies, career and life in general. So having a space that isn’t perfect and I am not in control of is, I’ve found, quite healthy. I spend a lot of time with our kids outdoors; we deweed together, look for spiders, rehome snails and cut trimmings for little vases by their beds. Watching my kids play in their mud kitchen and carry weeds over to the compost in our allotment is one of my greatest joys of parenting. And something I’m proud of amongst our very concrete existence.
Anyway, a few asked to see our garden’s development after the last few home tours, so I took some recent pictures. It definitely doesn’t look like it did that first year (2022, 6 years after we moved in), when everything was spaced and planted. After that 40 degree summer of ‘22 (when we were away and forgot to ask neighbours to water anything) we pretty much had to start again!
The main lesson I learnt along the way:
Gardens cost a lot of money. I did not know this. Not only tiles, borders and grass (which we laid ourselves to save costs) but pots and plants and small trees! If you’ve got something to work with I’m sure you could do it cheaply but if you inherited a waist high entire bramble bush of a garden, it’ll be a hard slog.
We made the beds ourselves from wood from the local timber yard. The top soil we found locally via Gumtree and Chris laid the lawn himself (via online tutorials!).
We designed how the garden would look on a piece of paper (like most of our home designs!) and tried to make it feel less like a square with curves of woodchip to signify the ‘play’ area and stepping stones and natural stone tiles to feel ‘lived in’. We had to remove the tree in the middle of the garden due to the extension (it would’ve been next to our back doors!) but we have plenty of shade from our neighbour’s tree.
We are still very overlooked, our neighbour cut down their tree behind us pretty much as soon as we had finished. The olive tree here has grown significantly and we are hoping to extend this bit of the fence and push the climbers round to feel less exposed. As we tiled to the back we can’t add any trees outside of pots so are very limited to what we can do!
My dad, thankfully, is green-fingered and has donated a lot of the plants in our garden (the bamboo, antirrhinums, verbena, geraniums), we get a lot from local plant sales and then Morrisons for olive trees and other bedding plants.
I love wild meadowy flowers only, I hate shrubs and not really a fan of trees, which doesn’t exactly make for an interesting garden (especially in winter!). Wild meadow flowers also look great one year and then often don’t grow back or end up limp and lifeless by the end of their bloom. So I’ve learnt to compromise and focus on what does look great, comes back yearly and can survive in our garden.
We have a north east facing garden, no sun in the winter but then half the garden gets full sun after May - but then it all gets a bit hot and dry. So most of my gardening focus has been working out what can survive and thus which plants I want to spend my money on. I have fallen on:
Geraniums - pretty much the only thing I can keep alive, perhaps even help flourish.
Salvia - these are pretty unkillable and so beautiful and have come back beautifully year after year. So much better than lavender (which is my ultimate favourite but alas, they’re not friends of mine).
Mexican fleabane - if I could go back and replant my entire garden with this, I would!
Fatsia Japonica - our shady alleyway is a shrine to these.
Olive trees - our £25 Morrison one from a few years ago is holding up surprisingly well!
What I love:
Our decision to use different storage options: we went with a streamlined shed and cushion boxes and metal storage bins rather than a large shed (we have one in the front too, to house scooters and kids bikes etc) which saved so much space.
And I adore our tiles. They’re just from Topps (I feel like most people have these in their bathroom but they’re so striking when used in a large area). They are for outdoor use but can be a bit slippy (but fine now our kids are older - I just make sure there’s a towel laid down if they’re running in and out of a paddling pool). Part of me wishes we’d scrapped the grass and just made it an open tiled space to help with upkeep but it is nice to have somewhere soft for the kids, especially when we live in such an urban area.
And then there’s the front garden, which was another huge project on its own. After the back garden took so long, we decided to keep the front simple (it’s also south facing so needed some real hardy plants) and tile it with plants in pots and storage. It might seem a bit clinical to some but I love that I can take the bins out in my slippers without treading on mud and grass! The gap in the front wall (this was my idea and I am so thrilled with how it turned out!) is filled with salvia, lavender and Mexican fleabane and is filled with bees in the summer (this all came back from last year!).
The chequerboard tiles were laid by John from Victorian Tiling (who also brought our hallway tiles back to life), if you are London based he is the best (and really loves what he does!). The front door is painted Farrow & Ball ‘Studio Green’ and the front gate is ‘Sap Green’.
It still needs some growing, settling and softening but I’m pretty proud of where we have got to.
Looks wonderful! I agree - letting go of perfectionism in gardening is so freeing
This looks absolutely lovely! You can tell the time and effort you have all put into this backyard -- and yes, as you said money too! What a cozy oasis for your family. Outdoor spaces will always be a work in progress and in many ways require even more work an upkeep than our interiors. I love the memories your family has been able to make back here.
My backyard is similarly sized to yours. I have a lovely raised deck off the back of my house that is fully decorated. But the grass off the deck is all weeds and the fence along the very back of our yard only is falling down, in part due to an overgrowth of ivy in our back neighbor's yard. We are many years away from having the funds to improve it. I appreciate the inspiration.