Before you redevelop a garden to your own taste, or even repair it in its present form, it is worth looking hard at the structure that already exists like the paths, steps, walls, and open spaces to read their style and period and to see how the design was originally intended to work.

Whatever you want to achieve. The garden needs to complement the house. The house is the biggest piece of structure in any garden, and you must work with it, not against it. It is always worth trying to understand how others before you have gardened on the site so you can appreciate the remaining strengths of the design and incorporate them into your new garden. Scrap them altogether if you like, but be sure you know what you are getting rid of.

Patterns from the past

Usually the first layout of the garden, made when the house was first built, will dominate the garden, setting out the levels and open spaces. A Victorian townhouse, for instance, would originally have had a formal front garden screened from the road with evergreen shrubberies, gravel or asphalt paths with rope-tile edges, and tightly shaped beds for annual flowers. There may be an island bed in the center of the space where vehicles turned, or a central path to the front door.

An old garden may also have a succession of later overlays made by subsequent owner beds to add more color hedges or flowering shrubs to subdivide the garden. Features may have been removed or replaced; vegetable beds may have been grassed over to reduce maintenance. Or it may be that the garden has never had any serious thought or planning put into it at all and has only a few old apple trees or just bare grass.

There may be years and years of neglect, with the bigger plants competing for light and any pruning having been done only by cutting off anything that sticks out around the edges.

When you uncover the logic of what has been done around the house in the past, you can decide whether it is of use to you and how best to develop the garden. It is surprising how often a gardener who likes a flowing, natural garden style – when confronted with living in a four-square, visually dominant house – will opt for the logic of a more formalized style, simply to match strength with strength. The same person, given an old country cottage, would make a deliciously ramshackle cottage garden and love it just as much.

Watching your step

Is the paving dangerously uneven? Could it be relaid, or does it really need replacing? Are gravel paths riddled with weeds because they have no hard foundation and are laid over soil, or are they well constructed on a hardcore base and need only has the surface skimmed off and relaid? Is the grass path across a lawn actually hardcore underneath? A spade will quickly tell you, Matters like these need to be explored early on, because they will be messy and expensive to fix, and they need to be planned for properly.

Buried structures

Drought can be a most useful tool in re-planning a garden, for it will show up those parts of a lawn where there are old paths or hard structures underneath. Maybe a concrete pond that leaked has been broken up and left in place with a layer of turf over the top. It would be visible as a yellow patch of grass in very dry weather.

Foundations of old sheds and outbuildings can show up in the same way. There is no need, of course, to worry about these early on; they can be dug out in future years when more pressing matters than an even lawn have been dealt with. Lawns are easily dug and quick to heal, and they come last on the list of priorities when rejuvenating a garden.

However, if you want to plant where there are the remains of older constructions in the soil, then you need to dig them out, or at least know early on what size of the task awaits you. Heavy concrete or brick foundations can be hard work to dig out and bulky to dispose of.

There is a lot of sense in making some trial diggings to establish how far they extend. It may be that you could break up all this concrete and use it and any other rubble, stone, or brick in the foundations of a new path or steps. It beats paying for them to be taken away in a dumpster, even if you have to get busy with a spade and a pick sooner rather than later.