Words and Photography by Julia-Atkinson-Dunn
Are you a first-home buyer or do you have someone in your life who has recently purchased their first home? If so here is some great advice for tackling the garden at your new home.
Tips for making informed choices
My gut feeling is that most first-home buyers are not experienced gardeners. From my own perspective, I can say that ploughing time and money into a rented outdoor space outweighed the benefits of getting into growing. Understandably, it’s far more appealing to build a home with pieces that can be packed up and taken.
On arriving at a fresh property as an owner, where investment into the ground holds some new personal value, the potential can be overwhelming. Our first-time homeowner knows more than they care to admit about interest rates and very little about the seasonal behaviour of their inherited planting!
Here are some tips I have pulled together from my own experience of going from a renter to a home – and garden – owner.
Arm yourself with basic botanical knowledge
Before you spiral into feelings of intimidation or do something rash, take a moment to arm yourself with some basic information. To aid any future decision-making you need an understanding of what is currently planted in your yard so that you can take sensible and cost-saving action. By grasping how perennial, annual, evergreen and deciduous plants work, you can take stock of what you have and decide what will stay or go.
For example, many perennials can be dug up and moved, while any annual flowering plants you see will die away on their own.
Take stock
The urge to ‘clear the section’ on arrival is a common one, particularly for new homeowners with little growing experience. What you perceive to be a messy mass of planting might simply be a lovely garden that needs a light tidy-up! Remember, plants cost money and trees take years to mature, so before you impulsively dig, cut and chuck, you need to understand the benefits of what you are throwing out. Not to mention that if you remove a plant, something else will definitely pop up in its place – and it will be of the weedy variety.
Take the time to research and learn about what is already there before deciding what moves to make. By identifying the plants that thrive in your new space, you will be given clues as to what others you could add with success. Lure in a garden-minded friend or neighbour with the promise of coffee and cake and get them to walk your borders, putting names to those foreign plants for you.
Be patient and document
One piece of garden advice I received was to wait a whole year before making any major changes to a newly purchased garden. Depending on the season you arrive in, the planting will not be fully revealed.
A deciduous tree in winter hasn’t yet demonstrated its valuable shade in summer or appreciated autumn colour. Moving into a house in summer will give you a chance to see many summer flowering perennials, but you have no idea of the location of any spring bulbs that may be hiding below the soil. I speak from experience when I say you might arrive with a million ideas but don’t yet have an understanding of the shady spots or lack of shelter that will affect your idealistic plans.
By all means, weed away, mulch your beds, cut back spent flowers and definitely take photographs to remind yourself of how the garden behaves in each season.
Best of all, by holding back you will get a firm grasp on how you actually use the existing space and gain ideas through this experience for future changes.
Considerations when planting
Once you feel you have a clear understanding of your microenvironment, you might start making some changes and additions. When choosing trees, research their mature size and be sure to plant with enough space in mind. Make sure you know where utilities are buried before you start digging and think about the planting distance from fences or gutters if that’s relevant.
You might have moved into a new house where a developer has created some basic beds. Without fail, these tend to be too narrow to create nice layered garden planting, so perhaps you want to extend these before you start. Remember, gardens don’t have to be laid out with straight lines!
While gardening might have previously held little interest, take your time to discover if this might be for you before googling ‘low-maintenance planting’. There is no such thing as green space that doesn’t need to be touched or monitored, so why not plant in a way that encourages you to engage with the roll of the seasons and offers you the pleasure of picking for your home, growing for your dinner and getting your hands in the earth every now and then.
Extract from: A Guided Discovery of Gardening by Julia Atkinson Dunn, (Koa Press), $50
