What Your Garden Is Telling You at the End of Summer
Five things worth noticing before you start trying to fix everything
By late summer, a garden has stopped pretending.
The lawn shows where it struggles. Plants reveal whether they like where they have been put. Dry areas become obvious. So do places where water sits for too long. Some borders are still full of life; others have quietly run out of steam.
And there are usually parts of the garden that have worked rather better than expected.
Before reaching for the mower, hose, secateurs — or the credit card — spend ten minutes simply looking.
At Project Garden, this is where we like to begin.
Not with a list of jobs, but with the view that matters most.
Start With Your Favourite Window
Stand inside the house and look through the window you use most often.
Perhaps it is the kitchen window while you are making coffee. Perhaps it is the view from the sitting room, bedroom or the doors leading onto the terrace.
What catches your eye?
More importantly, what keeps catching your eye?
There may be a border that has grown beautifully through the summer. There may be an awkward bare patch you have spent months trying not to notice. Perhaps a tree frames the view perfectly. Perhaps the bins do.
Your favourite window tells you something important about the garden because it is one of the places from which you experience it most often.
A garden is not simply somewhere we go when the weather is good. For much of the year, we experience it from inside the house.
That view is therefore a perfectly sensible place to begin.
1. Where Has the Lawn Struggled?
Late summer can make lawn problems particularly obvious.
One area may remain green while another scorches. Grass beneath trees may be thin. A frequently walked route may be compacted. Moss may favour a damp or shaded corner.
The instinctive response is often to treat the symptom.
More seed. More feed. More water.
But first ask a different question:
Why is the lawn struggling there?
The answer might be shade, compacted soil, poor drainage, heavy use, tree roots or simply that grass is being asked to grow somewhere it would rather not.
Sometimes the answer is better lawn care.
Sometimes the answer is accepting that a particular corner wants to be something other than lawn.
The garden is giving you information either way.
2. Which Plants Have Thrived Without Much Help?
Gardeners naturally notice failures.
The rose with blackspot gets our attention. So does the shrub that refuses to flower or the perennial that disappeared without so much as a goodbye.
But the plants worth studying at the end of summer are often the ones that have quietly got on with the job.
Which plants have flowered well?
Which still look healthy?
Which have coped with dry periods without constant watering?
Which are attracting bees, butterflies or other wildlife?
And which look as though they actually belong where they are growing?
These plants are telling you something about your soil, aspect, drainage and local conditions.
Rather than automatically searching for something new, it can make sense to learn from what is already succeeding.
One thriving plant can sometimes tell you more about a border than several disappointing ones.
3. What Has Water Been Doing?
Water is becoming one of the most useful things to observe in a garden.
Look for the places that dry first.
Then look for the places that remain damp.
Notice where plants repeatedly wilt, where lawns brown quickly and where heavy rainfall tends to sit rather than disappear into the soil.
The answer is not necessarily more watering.
Improving soil, adding mulch, creating shade, choosing more appropriate plants or collecting rainwater may make a greater difference.
Where watering is genuinely needed, it should ideally go to the right place, in the right quantity and at the right time.
A sprinkler running across everything may feel productive while giving some plants too much water and others too little.
Before thinking about irrigation, understand how water already behaves in the garden.
4. Which Parts of the Garden Have You Actually Used?
This is one of the most revealing questions of all.
Where did you sit this summer?
Where did you eat?
Where did children or grandchildren play?
Where did you naturally stop with a cup of tea or an evening drink?
And which supposedly important garden features were hardly used at all?
There is no rule saying a terrace must be used simply because somebody once decided to put a terrace there.
Perhaps another corner catches the evening sun.
Perhaps the attractive bench is actually in a draught.
Perhaps the place you keep dragging a chair to is telling you where the seating should have been in the first place.
The way a garden is genuinely used matters more than the way somebody once imagined it would be used.
Comfort, shade, shelter, privacy, sunlight and views all influence where people naturally choose to spend time.
That is useful information.
5. What Irritates You Every Time You See It?
This may sound rather less horticultural, but it is worth doing.
What annoys you?
The overgrown shrub blocking a window?
The border that constantly collapses over the path?
The hosepipe you trip over?
The empty corner?
The view of the shed?
The hedge that has grown too wide?
The lawn edge that never quite looks right?
Small irritations have an interesting habit of becoming invisible because we see them every day.
But once identified, they can provide some of the most worthwhile improvements to a garden.
You do not necessarily need to redesign the entire space.
You may simply need to solve the one thing that has been bothering you for three years.
Don’t Fix Everything
Late summer can create a dangerous urge to make lists.
Long ones.
Dig this up. Move that. Replace those. Reseed the lawn. Rebuild the border. Buy several plants we have nowhere sensible to put.
There is another option.
Divide what you have noticed into three groups:
Keep
Things that work.
Healthy plants. Good views. Useful structures. Successful habitats. Places you enjoy being.
They do not need improving merely because a new gardening season is approaching.
Improve
Things with good foundations that need some help.
A border may need thinning and reorganising rather than replacing. Soil may need improvement. A seating area may need shelter or better planting around it.
Replace
Things that genuinely are not working.
A repeatedly failing plant. An unsafe structure. An area whose maintenance requirements bear no relation to the enjoyment it provides.
Replacement should be the last conclusion rather than the first.
Gardens usually contain far more worth keeping than we initially think.
Three Things Worth Doing Now
You do not need an enormous end-of-summer gardening programme.
Start with three things.
1. Take a few photographs
Photograph the garden from the windows and positions you use most.
By February it will be surprisingly difficult to remember exactly where the gaps were in August.
2. Write down what succeeded and what struggled
Do not rely on memory.
A few notes about plants, lawns, water, shade and how you used the garden will be surprisingly useful when planning autumn and spring work.
3. Choose one priority
Not ten.
One.
Perhaps it is improving a tired border.
Perhaps it is making the lawn easier to manage.
Perhaps it is creating somewhere comfortable to sit.
Perhaps it is reducing the amount of watering required next summer.
A garden rarely needs to be transformed all at once.
Often it simply needs the right thing to happen next.
The Garden Is Already Giving You Clues
We sometimes talk about a garden as though it is waiting for us to impose a plan upon it.
It isn’t.
It is already responding to sunlight, rain, soil, shade, wildlife, temperature and the people using it.
By the end of summer, much of that information is sitting in plain sight.
The useful skill is noticing it.
That is why Project Garden begins by looking before changing — and by understanding a garden before asking what should be done to it.
Sometimes the best improvement begins with nothing more complicated than standing at your favourite window and paying attention.
Next in the Project Garden Journal
The September Reset — what to cut back, what to leave alone and what to start planning now.
If you would like the next Project Garden Journal story when it appears, subscribe to the Journal and we will send it directly to you.
If something you have noticed in your own garden needs more than an article, you can also request an introductory visit and we will begin with the garden itself.