Where do I start with a neglected, overgrown garden?

The instinct on taking on an overgrown garden is to clear it and start again, and it is almost always the wrong one. Under the brambles there are usually established trees, shrubs and bulbs worth many years and a great deal of money, and a garden cleared to bare soil in February looks a great deal poorer in June than one that was cut back and watched.

Safety

Step by step

1. Do a hazard survey before you touch anything.Walk it slowly. Look for broken glass, buried wire, spikes and old fence posts, uncovered drains and wells, rotten structures, unstable trees and hanging limbs, and any asbestos cement on sheds, garages and outbuildings. Note anything you must not disturb.
2. Treat suspected asbestos as a stop.Corrugated cement sheeting on older sheds and garages, and some old rainwater goods and flues, may contain asbestos. It is safe if left intact and dangerous if broken or cut. It has to be assessed and removed properly — do not break it up, do not put it in a skip, and do not power-wash it.
3. Sort out access and the ground you walk on.Clear a route through, make paths and steps safe, and establish somewhere to put material. Everything else takes longer than it needs to if you cannot get around and have nowhere to stack.
4. Cut only to see.Take brambles, nettles and rampant growth down to a level where you can see the boundaries, the structures, the trees and the shape of the plot. Do not dig, do not clear beds to bare soil and do not remove anything woody yet.
5. Identify what is there before you remove it.Photograph everything you cannot name and look it up, or ask someone who can. Established trees, fruit trees, mature shrubs, hedges and bulbs are the most valuable things in an overgrown garden and the easiest to destroy in a weekend.
6. Wait a full growing season.This is the discipline that separates a good outcome from a regrettable one. Bulbs appear in spring, herbaceous plants in early summer, fruit in autumn. A year of watching costs you one season and saves you from removing things that cannot be replaced.
7. Deal with boundaries and structures next.Fences, walls, sheds, gates. These are the things that take the longest, cost the most, and are hardest to do once planting is established. Doing them before replanting is far easier than after.
8. Renovate rather than replace where you can.Overgrown hedges, old fruit trees and mature shrubs can usually be brought back over two or three seasons of staged cutting, and the result is far better than anything you could plant. Renovate hard only into plants that tolerate it.
9. Then plan and plant.By this point you know the shape, the soil, the light, the wet spots and what already grows. That is a far better basis for a design than anything you could have decided in the first month.

Tips

• Take photographs at every stage from fixed points. In two years you will not believe what it looked like, and the record is genuinely useful for working out what was where.
• Do the light and drainage survey during the first year while you are waiting. It is exactly the year in which you have time to notice.
• Brambles, bindweed, ground elder, horsetail and Japanese knotweed each need different treatment, and the last of these has legal implications for sale and for spreading it. Identify what you have before choosing a method.
• A skip or a series of green-waste collections is usually cheaper than the alternatives, but check what can and cannot go in one — soil, rubble and anything suspected of containing asbestos are all handled separately.
• Do not start with the part that looks worst. Start with access, then with a small area you can finish, because a finished corner sustains the effort far better than an evenly half-done garden.

Common mistakes

• Clearing everything to bare soil in the first month — You will remove mature planting worth years of growth, before you have seen what the garden contains. Almost everyone who does this regrets a specific plant they destroyed without knowing it was there.
• Cutting into an overgrown area without checking what is in it first — Overgrown gardens hide glass, wire, spikes, wasp nests and rotten structures. A strimmer through hidden wire or glass is a serious injury risk.
• Breaking up or removing old cement sheeting yourself — It may contain asbestos, and breaking it releases fibres. Intact it is safe; disturbed it is a genuine long-term health hazard and a legal disposal issue. It needs assessing and, if confirmed, licensed removal.
• Renovating a hedge or an old shrub all in one go — Some species tolerate hard renovation and some die. Staged reduction over two or three seasons is nearly always the safer route and gives a better shape.

Questions people ask