QUESTIONS to ask your garden...

When his garden isn’t living up to expectations, MICHAEL McCOY asks it a series of questions. In the last of this design series, he muses on our individual likings for tidy, messy and open spaces

Question 1 Does it need a declutter?

Sometimes I wonder if I should rebrand my garden design practice and become the first professional garden declutterer. Everywhere I go, I see gardens that can benefit from such services.

It’s not that they’re cluttered with too many different plants. Some of my favourite gardens in the world show a total lack of discipline in plant diversity. The unrestrained passion of the owner can trump the benefits of careful, logical or rational plant selection and, as a visitor, you find yourself aglow in a great bubble of plant love. Bring it on!

But what doesn’t work so well for me is when a garden is spatially cluttered or confusing. It’s an almost inevitable problem in (but isn’t restricted to) older gardens. Either plants have grown way larger than anyone thought they would, or they were overplanted. This may have been done with good intentions of thinning them as they grew, but the owner has either moved on or has been incapable of activating the ruthless hand necessary to carry out the planned cull. I totally get this. Ruthlessness is never difficult to imagine, but it’s much harder to action.

In some cases a plant has self-sown into the garden. In a worst-case scenario, this is a tree or a shrub, and probably something you would never have thought to plant. But now it’s there and growing so lustily that you can’t bring yourself to take it out. I get that too. I have way too many buddlejas as proof.

There are clearly practical issues with the slow creep of garden clutter. Gardens can become overly shady, for instance, or paths inaccessible. This is often tolerated, so you turn sideways to shimmy between plants, particularly after rain or, worse still, the shears are used to cut the offending plant back into a straight line, parallel with the path edge. Neither really works. It’s much better to get rid of the offending plant altogether, or to move it, which is always a tricky proposition in an already cluttered garden.

“It’s so critical to gardens that there’s some spatial clarity, that open areas are just that – open”

But the worst and most destructive form of cluttering in my (albeit biased) view is when someone decides that an open area of lawn is the perfect spot for a specimen tree or shrub. Or three. This can become spatially fatal.

It’s so critical to gardens that there’s some spatial clarity, that open areas are just that – open – and plantings between open spaces are dense enough to do their dividing work. There are many times and places when you may want to bend this rule, but it’s still worth bearing in mind and can, if more widely applied, benefit a lot of gardens. In fact, for many gardens the single biggest step for improvement would be achieved with a chainsaw.

Perhaps I’ll invent a Survivor-like game in which plants fight for retention, winning points for their ornamental or structural/ spatial contribution. Those that don’t make the grade will be ‘voted off the island’ with the aforementioned chainsaw.