Maintaining the Garden

The early years of my garden in Thornton le Dale were dominated by major projects: hard landscaping, digging to level and tier the slopes, building, and or course a lot of planting. Now the focus is more on maintaining what has been created: painting, repairing, weeding, felling, cutting back and shaping. There are still new projects to tackle - a summerhouse, a new front garden and drive, but this talk looks at the annual cycle of maintenance, as well as the revisiting of former work to revitalise or repair.

More pictures and information - sample slides from the talk.

Garth End Cottage Yorkshire Gardens National Trust Gardens Maintaining the Garden

The pond in early summer - a heavy maintenance element in a garden

The pond in early summer - a heavy maintenance feature

Just 3 maintenance tasks

Path replacement

This path was laid with broken flagstones 12 years ago. Parts had buckled and become uneven. The brick risers for the steps had also suffered spalling with frost. At the same time, I had always wanted to run electricity up to the garden shed. The result was to take up this path, lay an armour sheathed cable, re-level the base for the path, then replace the flags.

Heather bed in need of replacement

A heather bed was planted many years ago - ericas rather than callunas, as we do not have acid soil. It has given seasonal colour over the winters, but has gradually become straggly and overgrown. Some plants were cut back, others were layered for regrowth, and a number of new plants were put in.

Topiary forms

As well as boundary hedges, there are a number of topiary specimens that need clipping, usually twice per year. Here is a standard copper beech clipped into a spiral. Underneath is clipped box, with a variegated privet ball and cone. Behind are two leylandii clipped to a cone shape. The variegated bush on the right is becoming too large. Time for felling.