Help! My garden is out of control

Six months ago I got married. My new husband and I sold our respective houses and together bought a new one. In six days. The madness was compounded by moving from two small plots, each about 12 metres by 10 metres, to a vast, romantically overgrown Oxford garden with figs, apples, roses and specimen trees.

The problem with romantically overgrown gardens is that they teeter on the fragile, before being overwhelmed by pest, weed, disease and chaos. Ours is already heading towards an unsalvageable omnishambles.

Our challenge is to overhaul this one-acre garden over the coming year, reveal what is beneath the jungle and create an exquisite, scented paradise that can be enjoyed by friends, family and other animals. So, no pressure.

I will be writing about my progress in House & Home with seasonal updates. This is my spring dispatch.

A swift survey revealed multiple impediments to a decent, respectable plot that would win approval from John Brookes, the eminent landscaper who taught me garden design in the early 1980s:

Animal: muntjac, badger, squirrel, pigeon and a rat (OK there are probably dozens of the creatures but this one is chummy. He likes to sit opposite our kitchen window and wave to us);

Vegetable: bindweed, ground elder, ivy of colossal proportions, brambles, nettles, elder and wisteria. Yes, wisteria — the lovely climber;

Mineral: steep slopes and wildly uneven ground;

Human: proposed large development to the south of our plot.

Dealing with all this while working and travelling is going to be tough. What is more, the garden will look worse rather than better by next spring because it needs radical, slash-and-burn treatment.

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The alleged “hedges” are cases in point. They may be beyond renovation but I am going to try chopping them back so hard that they will look wretched until they recover enough to push out a few leaves. If they recover at all. They will be one of our biggest challenges, along with the “lawns”, the monstrous wisterias, the lack of light and reassuring nature lovers we will never get rid of all the ivy, nettles and brambles and other plants that provide food and homes for insects, amphibians and birds.

Tackling thugs

My new husband (NH) and I have agreed that I will be in charge of the garden while he provides the muscle. In other words, he massages my back every night. All he asks in return is a herb bed. All I cannot provide is a herb bed.

The garden is so shaded that plants such as herbs will struggle. This is thanks to an arboricultural legacy stretching back to the mid-19th century when a two-room farmhouse surrounded by fields was gentrified into what is now our house: a cottage orné bounded by specimen trees.

When they were planted, thujas and other thugs may have seemed interesting, attractive even. Maybe, but they are too big. A cedar, hornbeam, hollies, thujas, 10m pines, 9m walnut and yews cast long shadows.

Worse, several hollies and yews are covered by the aggressor of the rose world, “Kiftsgate”, whose dual-direction thorns lacerate everything in sight. In rose manuals it is referred to euphemistically as “vigorous” — which means the mighty conifers in our garden are likely to die under its smothering weight.

The four or five ancient wisterias with gloriously gnarled trunks are threatening yew hedges and the hornbeam with their light and rain-hogging tendencies.

A tulip tree, which promises large, creamy-green flowers in June, is planted too close to a liquid amber, and so both trees are suffering. And both throw such dense shadow across the alleged lawn that moss rather than grass is the main component. I like moss. The NH likes croquet. Moss and croquet do not mix.

So never mind a grand plan. There is no way we can come up with any kind of plan until we get light into the place and until we can see what lies beneath the bramble, weed and dead wood.

Cut and thrust

My beloved tools, last used at my two-acre garden of 20 years ago, come into their own again: pruning saw, loppers, telescopic tree loppers, garden fork, border spade and secateurs. We cut, slash, saw and dig. My old petrol-driven chainsaw is sent to the dump in favour of a battery-powered 30cm micro beast. It is heavy.

Aching muscles and painful thighs/back/arms are offset by the delight of seeing logs build up for next winter’s fire — and maybe even the winter after that — and the garden emerges from its tousled sleep.

Paths appear. A magnificent old mulberry emerges along with cotoneaster, crab apple, flowering cherry and laburnums. Ferns and hellebores reveal themselves. Snowdrops, primroses, jonquils and Solomon’s Seal pop up among the fruit trees and scillas shake their blue heads along the paths.

But a 3m square patch of bamboo is impenetrable to everyone and everything except the odd toad and a muntjac. A two-man anti-bamboo (AB) team arrives and blasts the bamboo with glyphosate. Twice. Mostly I avoid this controversial chemical, partly because I have never been convinced by the claim that it neutralises on contact with soil and more recently because of the chemical company Bayer’s $80m damages payment in favour of a groundsman with terminal cancer, who had used glyphosate over many years.

Faced with a plant that threatens to invade the whole garden and house I agree to a blitz. After a few days to allow the poison to get down into the roots the AB team returns with a digger to remove the lot. We hope. For the next 10 days the leathery rhizomes of the muntjac’s former home burn and smoulder.

Faced with a plant that threatens to invade the whole garden and house I agree to a blitz

As the digging begins the muntjac’s mournful barks mingle with hooting owls in a botanical requiem for the bamboo. Bereft, he eats all our roses, bar Kiftsgate, but he has retreated next door to take up residence in an elder thicket.

He is right to be nervous. I used to shoot and eat the muntjac that ate my last garden, but maybe age has mellowed me: I cannot face the thought of eating the ugly little deer.

While NH and I are away on honeymoon (Mexico to see Edward James’s extraordinary surrealist garden), a tree surgeon and one of Oxford City tree officers inspect our trees. None is covered by a Tree Preservation Order but we live in a conservation area and so have to apply for planning permission to cut back the ornamental trees and prune the fruit trees. We get permission to cut back the thugs by so little that I wonder if it will be worth the trouble and cost.

Our tree surgeons take a few meagre branches off the cedar, which continues to throw catkins and needles into our gutters and to shade the south façade of the house.

Never mind a grand plan. We cannot come up with any plan until we get light into the place

NH materialises, ashen-faced: “Why did you tell them to take down the holly?” This is (was) a weeping holly that framed the house and screened us from the lane. A misunderstanding from an otherwise top team. The upside is that NH can now have his herb bed in the space left by the holly.

I hard-prune the fruit trees which cannot have been touched for years. That night over dinner, a Swiss banker friend tells me that his Felco (Swiss) pruning saw is better than my Bahco (Swedish) pruning saw. No way. He is so convinced he gives me a retractable Felco. I challenge him to a pruning saw duel.

I try both saws, and the chainsaw, and loppers, on ivy with trunk-like stems as thick as a man’s biceps, brambles and the chaotic macramé of Russian vine stems and I am too exhausted to pass reasonable judgment on the pruning saws.

Tame behaviour

The boundary that causes us most concern is to the south, where a planning application for a care home has been turned down three times. Eventually the plot will be developed, which is why we need to prepare for next door’s jungle of privet, bramble, elder, bindweed, nettles and Russian vine being turned into a car park with 24/7 lighting.

So we order 70 bare-rooted laurels online. The first 10 are waiting in a coffin-like box when I arrive home late one night. In the dark, I rip open the packaging and stand the plants in a vat of water outside the back door. In the morning I discover that I have placed the plants beside the outlet for the condenser boiler so the top leaves are scorched.

The rest arrive and we start planting in large holes with a couple of spadefuls of leaf mould. Laurel is one of the few plants that will cope with dense shade and drought on our southern border. We will break up the monotonous evergreen by adding sweetly-scented ornamentals such as winter-flowering honeysuckle, choisya and viburnum, already planted between the laurels and the house.

Another important project is to install a big pond but, for the time being, one of the old plastic water tanks that NH has heaved out of the attic is dug into the ground to make a small wildlife pool for the long-tailed tits, robins, blackbirds and nuthatches that are daily visitors. We arrange stone from the garden around the edge and a chunk of terracotta pot to give birds, frogs and newts easy access.

Epimediums, snowdrops, cyclamen moved from elsewhere in the garden will bulk up, soften the edge and hide the side of the tank. I hope. Slowly, very slowly, we are taming the area around the house.

The outer edges of the garden are difficult to reach without a machete. Instead, we use loppers, chainsaw and a Mountfield ride-on mower with the deck set as high as it will go. Which is not high enough for some of the tussocks and the giant, overgrown mole (or maybe elephant?) hills.

At my last big garden I used an excellent German ride-on Wolf scooter mower which was nimble, fast and fun to use. I wanted another but UK suppliers warned me off, saying that Brexit would make getting parts impossible. I should have persevered. In the 10 years I had the Wolf it never needed spare parts. And it did not stop every few metres because yet another safety gadget decided that the grass was too long or the mower felt it had been spoken to unpleasantly (it had).

So far, the Mountfield and I do not get on. But I need all the help I can get for the next phase: yew, beech, holly and mixed hedge renovation as well as bindweed, ivy, nettle, dock, badger and squirrel control. All reader suggestions gratefully received.

Act 1: cast list of people and equipment

Tree surgeons

• Day one: three men
• Day two: five men
• Day three: three men
• Cherry picker
• Boards to protect the alleged lawn
• Chainsaws
• Tree shredder
• Trailer
• Pulleys
• Harnesses
• Helmets and lots of rope
• Lots of Personal Protection Equipment

Bamboo team

• One man: three days
• Two men: two days
• Mechanical digger
• Pickaxe
• Spade
• Chemical protection suit and sprayer

Planning permission to cut back trees

• One Oxford City tree officer

Clearance, fruit pruning and bonfires

• Me, NH and an occasional Saturday helper
• Chainsaw
• Ride-on
• Large and small loppers
• Pruning saw
• Telescopic tree lopper
• 3m orchard/tripod ladder
• Secateurs
• Hedgecutters
• Wheelbarrow
• Matches

Jane Owen is an author and Chelsea Flower Show gold medallist. She will return in summer with an update on her garden and her garden office.

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Letter in response to this article:

Looking forward to an update on Jane’s garden / From R Ramdohr, Weinheim, Germany