Out & About July 2017

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Award-winning garden designer Kate Gould says steady
maintenance of your garden need not be a chore and
careful planning now will mean you can enjoy it all the
more all the year round
ardens, especially small ones, look
the most pleasing when they are
swept and tidy – unless the style of
the garden is a relaxed and unstructured wild
flower haven – but with the modern pace of
life, time spent tidying your garden can be in
short supply.
Realistically there may be more pressing
tasks to attend to and time for gardening may
be at a premium.
If you find this is the case why not try this
approach.
Choose a nice sunny spring day and put
aside a couple of hours to tidy and sweep
away the remnants of the winter garden
debris.
Plants often look weather-beaten at this
time of year, but as soon as the perennials
are neatly cut down to the ground their
appearance is improved almost in seconds.
No garden is maintenance-free and, although
perennials look like hard work, they are often
much less maintenance than you think.
After cutting back and mulching them now,
there is very little to do throughout the rest
of the summer.
If you can at this time, add in pea stakes
or canes to support any plants that might
need it – Campanula, Delphinium, Phlox
are such cases – as it will prevent difficulty
later on in the year when selecting points to
push in supports among the foliage will be
challenging.
With the climate as it has been of late, one
of the most important jobs to do when the
weather improves is to feed the garden using
a slow release granular organic fertilizer.
The rainfall throughout winter will have
leached nutrients out of the soil and so
feeding your plants will not only encourage
strong growth, but flowers too and a well-
tended and fed plant is one that is less likely
Shrubs such as Hydrangea
can be fairly quickly cut
and tidied as can roses.
to succumb to problems later in the year.
After that is completed, the next sunny day on
which you can spare a couple of hours might be
well spent cleaning the patio.
No matter how well thought out, any external hard
landscaping will be subjected to all the elements
Mother Nature can throw at it and there will be
times when simply brushing and washing down
your patio doesn’t get it as clean as it could be.
There are a multitude of chemical and ‘green’
products on the market to clean stone and you
should, of course, always read the label and try
a test patch first regardless of which product you
purchase.
Some, such as Patio Magic, provide really good
effects on sandstone and man-made paving. It is a
product that can be diluted and watered on, there
is no scrubbing or brushing and even if the effects
are not perhaps immediate, the gentle cleaning
effect keeps on working through the year.
The maintenance of your garden shouldn’t be a
chore, it should be something you enjoy and want
to do if you want to actively garden your space
rather than employ a maintenance gardener.
Whichever approach you take, the time spent in
cleaning and tidying should always be make the
time you spend in the garden after enjoying the
fruits of your labours worthwhile.
Kate Gould is an award
winning garden designer
with more than a decade’s
hands-on experience
transforming gardens
of all sizes and a regular
exhibitor at the RHS
Chelsea Flower Show
where she has been
awarded three gold medals.