After 12 months and a mere 104 hours work, does your garden look anything like you planned for it to look?

So you may feel just a little disappointed because there may be less colour in the garden now than there was at the 6 month mark, but there’s a good reason for that. That was high summer, the most floriferous time of year. It’s a fairly dead time of year now: a moment of waiting; everything in your garden should be bursting at the buds and just about to bring you the most colourful, trouble-free year you’ve ever had in your garden.

If you took colour shots of your garden before you started our work programme, get them out and gloat over them. They give you a true comparison from which you can chart your real progress, because those snaps of 12 months ago were taken at the same time of year. Even if you haven’t achieved all you hoped for, the differences should be enormous. Changing the shape of the lawn should have made the garden relax, and invite you to go out into it. Other permanent features like the patio, the ground cover plants, the ornaments all help to turn a dump into a garden. Shrubs, trees, climbers and herbaceous plants will all burst into growth soon, and each year they will give a better and better display, and you’ll have less work to do. Then there are hidden assets: like the way you have revitalized your soil. Now you’ve got your compost bin working smoothly, keep on mulching the soil, to suppress weeds and feed the plants.

You’ve got a year’s gardening experience behind you. The confidence of your achievements, the knowledge you’ve gained from your mistakes, plus a refreshing and novel way of looking at gardens that means you can move on to greater things if you want. Like adapting ideas from the gardens described in Types of Gardens section of this website, to a particular corner of your own garden. And you’ve got the know-how and experience to do it yourself.