Lawn to wildlife haven: a new-build garden

A learning journey

Mostly for myself, I've decided to start blogging a little project I've started: transforming my blank canvas of a new-build garden into, hopefully, a small haven for wildlife. And learning along the way. 

A quick note first. I'm really lucky to have a garden of my own to practice in as I study the RHS level 2 qualification. It's only small, but it is definitely nice to have this space right next to my house. That said, it's not necessary, so if you've come to this blog to find out what it's like to be a mature RHS student, please don't feel like you'll be disadvantaged if you haven't got a garden. 

Some of the best students on my course live in flats and even boats. It's a good idea to find somewhere to practice - but that can be a friend's house, an allotment, somewhere you volunteer, or even a tray on your kitchen counter as a potting bench!

Starting almost from scratch

My garden is a real blank slate. In 2021, we moved into a new-build with a small back garden. It had a patio with an air-source heat pump and some newish furniture, some surprisingly decent-quality fencing, turf, and a very low-quality shed which fell apart almost immediately. That was it.

The soil, as I found out when putting the washing line in, is very heavy clay mixed with builder's rubble. It cracks in summer and bogs in winter. It's compacted, tough to dig and has a hard pan beneath the top layer. The garden is southwest-facing, which has its benefits, but it gets unpleasantly hot from June to September. 

Since moving in, we made a few changes. First, I installed a small concrete foundation (which I'm very proud of) and my husband built a small shed (which I'm also very proud of). There's a water butt and compost heap behind it. No path to it, though, and much of the shed is taken up by a lawnmower, which has become annoying as we've acquired more garden gear.

I also built four raised beds from old scaffold boards. These have done well providing us with fruit, veg and cut flowers for three years (I loosely followed Huw Edwards' Veg in One Bed, a great guide for raised-bed newbies). But they've now started to rot and need to go.

Most recently, my herbs were getting too big for their pots, so I dug a small herb bed. I made dividing lines with old bricks, added a little statue I bought for £5 on Facebook Marketplace, and added in some plants. I dug in a bit of compost, but mostly just chose plants that I thought would do reasonably OK in hot conditions and clay soil. The rosemary, sage, lavender and dogwood seem particularly happy there.

Lastly, I added a Virginia creeper which looks great against the shed in early autumn, a patio grape vine, and a lovely passionflower (Passiflora 'Snow Queen') in the seating area. 

Wishes

I wanted a garden that was:

• Private. My neighbours are lovely, but the garden is overlooked and we wanted a sense of privacy and cocooning. 
• Biodiverse. The garden might be small, but I want it to be home to as many creatures as possible - particularly insects. We're near a farmers' field, which seems to produce a lot of cluster flies that try to get into our loft every autumn - but generally the surrounding area is all unplanted lawns, patio, even some astroturf. I'd like to give nature a tiny haven here. 
• Cat-friendly. My cat Polly doesn't really wander, but likes to keep me company while I'm gardening. I'd like to give her some perches and snoozing spots to enjoy as she oversees me in the summer. 
• Practical. After living here for three years, we know there are some practical needs to meet. The patio is absolutely, unbearably roasting in summer and plants on the right-hand side of the garden tend to get cooked. We wanted some shade, and we also wanted a path to the shed.  Lastly, we didn't want a lawn - we don't have kids and lawns don't contribute much to biodiversity, plus it would be great to free up space in the shed by ditching the mower.

Polly investigates the raised beds

Constraints

There were some obstacles to take into account when planning the garden.

• Legal. Our place is shared ownership, so there are some lease constraints for now. We can't do major hardscaping or introduce large trees - everything needs to be reasonably undo-able if we move.
• Cost. I don't have a big budget for this project while I'm studying, so although I love buying plants and shiny things for the garden, I'll need to be thrifty,
• I want to keep a lot of what we've done in the garden already, since it was so recent. The herb beds, the shed, the garden furniture, the passionflower and the Virginia creeper stay.

Plan

Three weeks of iterations and refinements resulted in this 'design'. Most of the lawn is replaced by beds, with just a circle left beneath the washing line - this can be taken care of with just a strimmer, freeing up much-needed shed space!

Most of the rest of the garden is beds. I'm keeping one raised bed, around the existing gooseberry bush. I hope this will help to contain it. The rest are coming out.

Unlike a 'proper' garden design, I haven't planned exactly what I'll plant. Although I have ideas, I'm still learning, so I want to leave room to add in plants I discover as I go! This is just a plan for the groundworks.

You can see I initially included a veg plot - we no longer need this now we have an allotment, which gives me more creative freedom!

Sketching out

My husband works at an outdoor activity centre and had some line paint, the kind used for marking out football pitches, in a can. I borrowed it to translate my sketch to reality.

This was pretty straightforward. I used tent pegs and string to set out the edges of the path, then sprayed along the string using a straight edge. For the circular minilawn around the washing line, I tied a piece of string to the pole, pulled it taut, and cut its length to half the desired diameter of the circle. 

Keeping it taut, I slowly moved it round, spraying dots at its end. Then I joined the dots. More accurate methods exist, but this worked pretty well and was surprisingly neat. The edges of the lawn will be obscured by plants, which is a bit sad given how nicely it turned out at the end!

 

Taken through a rainy upstairs window!

Digging out

First, I dug out the path, because I needed one. I removed the turf to a depth of about 10cm and roughly levelled it with a spirit level and a soil rake. 

Then I lined the shallow trench with weed control fabric and pegged it down with membrane pegs.

I edged the path with plastic edging, which comes in a roll from Amazon and which I already had from a previous project. This was both over-thrifty and overconfident in my skill! The edging is really difficult to straighten, and I was too stubborn to enlist help, so it's not very neat. I'm probably going to re-do this with a helper and willow edging, which is much more fitting with the wildilfe-friendly ethos I'm going for. There is lots of willow at my husband's activity centre, so no extra carbon involved in transporting it either. 

Here's the cunning bit. We've recently taken over an allotment with hundreds of honeyberry shrubs in plastic growbags, mulched thickly with bark. As we've rehomed the live ones and disposed of the dead ones, we've been keeping the bark, and there was enough of it to fill the path. This will probably need topping up in spring, but it'll do for now, and it's free!

The turf that I removed has gone to the allotment, stacked upside-down. It'll turn into a nice topsoil that we can use there. 

Next steps

That's it for now. Next, I'll dig out the beds - which will be a nice opportunity to practice double-digging - and remove the raised beds.