Countryside garden restoration — Mellford Green

Before: A once-lovely country garden that had slipped — half the beds swallowed by grass and brambles, a mossy, patchy lawn, and mature trees whose lower branches had been battling the hedge for years.

After: A garden with rooms again. We cut the brambles back to the fence line, restored the lawn by over-seeding and feeding rather than ripping it out, re-edged the beds and mulched hard, and pruned the trees and hedges properly — opening up the light that the original planting was designed for.

• Cleared brambles, nettles and self-seeded sycamore from the beds.
• Lawn restoration: scarify, feed, over-seed, and a few months of the right cutting.
• Reworked the main border with new planting in the shade of the mature trees.
• Set the shrub and hedge pruning onto a maintenance plan so it stays open.

"The garden looks like it's been looked after for years, not rescued. The first cut after they'd finished, the lawn actually looked like a lawn again."