Your Garden Questions, Answered

22 questions about my garden (and gardens in general)

Here in London, we love to complain about the weather but the truth is that it’s mild all year long, which means our gardens stay fairly green all winter and grow really quickly. It also means our summers are rarely too hot (and we have almost no mosquitoes!), so we can fling the windows and doors open most of the time from May through September.

This could be one of the reasons the Brits are so obsessed with their gardens and why interiors and gardens often “communicate” with each other so well, especially after modern renovations have been complete. I notice every time I go to my parents’ home in the States how disconnected the garden feels from the rest of the house. And how, for almost all of the year, the doors remain shut because it’s either far too cold, far too hot, or the bugs will invade.

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We are so, so lucky to have a little back garden in the middle of London. It’s not massive — around 5m wide and 9m long — but it’s more than enough for us. We tend to take advantage of the climate and use our garden as an extension of the house — we read, eat, nap, play out there. It was always going to be an important part of our living space. And because we have so much glass connecting the kitchen to the garden, it’s even more important to me that it looks beautiful.

our garden is very visible from our most lived-in spaces so it had to look nice, even in the winter.

I’ll get into this in more detail going through the questions below, but the garden was truly a blank slate when we bought the property. Or, more accurately, it was a blank slate covered in stones. There were three unhealthy trees that needed to be removed, a bed of bamboo right up next to the house (whyyyy) and (what felt like) millions of pebbles that someone had intentionally poured in. (Below there are lots of “before” images, too.)

Because we “eat what we kill” (i.e. budgetary constraints mean we’ve done up — and continue to do up — the house in phases), we tackled the garden a year and a half after the kitchen. This meant I had ample time to figure out what made sense in terms of zones and planting.

A few weeks ago, I put out a question box on Instagram asking for your garden-related questions. Many were repeats or related, so I’ve condensed them somewhat below into 22 queries that cover most of the bases. If you have any more, leave them in the comments below!

Ready? Let’s go.