Guide
Know your ground.
Six things worth establishing about your soil, levels and aspect before anybody draws anything — written for a Kent garden, and useful whether or not you ever ring me about it.
01
Dig three holes before you buy a single plant
A spade deep, in three different parts of the garden. You are looking for what the soil does when you squeeze it, how far down the roots and the worms go, what colour it turns lower down, and whether the hole still holds water an hour after you have filled it. Ten minutes of this tells you more than a season of guessing, and it is the first thing recorded at the survey stage of any commission.
02
Know which bit of the Weald you are standing on
Around Royal Tunbridge Wells the ground changes character over remarkably short distances — Tunbridge Wells Sand gives free-draining, acidic, often sandy ground that dries hard in summer, while the Wadhurst Clay beneath and around it is heavy, slow and wet in winter. Plenty of gardens sit across the junction of the two, which is why one end of a border can thrive while the other sulks. Neighbouring gardens are not reliable evidence; your own three holes are.
03
Sort the water before you sort the planting
Standing water after rain, moss taking over a lawn, a boggy corner at the bottom of a slope — these are levels and drainage problems wearing a planting disguise. No plant list fixes them. The cure is regrading, a land drain, a permeable surface or accepting the wet and planting for it, and all four of those are decisions taken on a survey drawing rather than at a garden centre.
04
Map the light before you place the terrace
Stand in the garden at nine, at one and at six, and note where the sun actually is — not where you assume it is. A south-facing house frequently means a north-facing terrace in shadow by lunchtime, and the best evening seat is often at the far end of the garden rather than against the back wall. Aspect also decides the planting: a hot, dry south wall and a cool north boundary want entirely different plants, in the same garden, ten metres apart.
05
Redraw the bed, then plant it densely
Most disappointing borders are simply too narrow. A 600mm strip along a fence holds one row of things, which means no layering, no succession and nowhere for a shrub to sit behind a perennial. A metre and a half is a working minimum for a mixed border; two metres is where they start to look like the photographs. Then plant closely enough that the perennials knit together within two seasons, because dense planting is the most effective weed control there is.
06
Structure first, flowers second
Put the evergreen and woody structure on the plan before anything that flowers: a few clipped shapes, a multi-stem tree to anchor a corner, an evergreen or two repeated along the length. That is the part doing the work in February, and it is the part people leave out because it is not what is on the trolley in June. Get it right and the border still looks deliberate for the four months a year when nothing much is happening.
Four things worth unlearning.
“The soil is terrible, so nothing will grow”
Almost every soil grows something beautifully — it just may not be the thing you first had in mind. Heavy Wealden clay is the envy of anyone on thin sand for most shrubs and roses, once its structure is improved and it is never worked wet. Free-draining acidic sand grows rhododendrons, pines and a Mediterranean palette that would rot in a fortnight on clay. Choosing for the ground you have is far cheaper, and far more successful, than fighting it for a decade.
“We’ll just get some colour in”
Colour is the easiest thing to add and the least important thing to decide. Shape, height, texture and when things happen are what make a border look composed; colour is the layer over the top. Start with colour and you end up with a border that is spectacular for a fortnight in June and awkward for the other fifty weeks.
“Low-maintenance” gardens
Lower-maintenance is real; no-maintenance is not. The things usually sold as no-maintenance — artificial grass, a sheet of membrane under gravel — are also the least pleasant to sit in and the worst for everything that lives in the garden. What genuinely reduces work is the right plant in the right place, dense planting, generous bed shapes rather than fiddly ones, and hard landscaping detailed so it does not collect leaves in every joint.
“It’ll look like the drawing next summer”
Perennials and grasses read properly by the end of their first full season and are at their best in year two or three. Shrubs take three to five years to do their job. Trees are a longer conversation entirely. A good planting plan expects that: deliberate from the first month, better every year, rather than finished on day one and tired by year three.
Or have the ground surveyed properly.
The survey stage does all of the above with instruments rather than a spade: landforms, existing planting and trees, buildings, structures and utilities measured into a scaled base plan, with soil samples taken and aspect assessed. It is the cheapest stage of any garden project and the one that decides whether the scheme still looks right in five years.
- Roughly what you want to be doing out there — eating, sitting, growing, letting the children or the dog loose.
- Photographs of the garden as it is, taken from the house as well as from the end.
- What you already know you want to keep: a tree, a view, a shed that has to stay.
- Where the water goes after heavy rain, and which corner never dries out.
- The budget you have in mind for the build. Saying it out loud early saves everyone a season.