Garden appraisal in Surrey

Most established gardens arrive without instructions. The people who planted them have moved on, and the plan has gone if there ever was one. What is left is a mixture: good decisions, gifts planted in the gaps, shrubs that have quietly outgrown their positions and one or two things that have died and left a hole.

The usual advice is to live with a garden for a year before touching it. That is sound, and slow. A Garden Appraisal gives you Paul's view before you start changing things. He walks the garden with you, tells you what you have and writes it down.

The Plant Hunter's Garden Appraisal is a garden designer's judgement applied to a garden that already exists, usually one Paul did not design. There are no drawings, no planting scheme and no build attached. You get an expert read of what is in the ground and a clear set of actions, and you decide what to do with them.

Moved into a house with a mature garden?

This is the situation the Garden Appraisal was made for. The garden is full, some of it is clearly good and none of it came with labels. You do not know which shrubs were planted on purpose and which arrived on their own, or what will happen if you cut that hedge back hard.

The same applies to a garden that was designed well some years ago and has drifted since. The odd plant from the original scheme has died and gifts have gone in wherever there was space. A large Ceanothus planted to hide a neighbour's roof has given up and something has to replace it. The layout still works, but the planting has lost its order.

Either way, the request Paul hears is the same: come and look at the planting as the plant expert and tell us what to do.

The visit

Paul comes once, for up to two hours, and walks the garden with you. He is reading it as a garden designer, looking at what the planting is doing, how it has grown, what is crowding what and where the garden is heading if nothing changes.

Some of what he says will be reassuring. A lot of what is in an inherited garden is better than it looks, and knowing which plants to leave alone is half the value. A Hydrangea paniculata that has not been pruned for three seasons is not finished. It needs the right cut in late winter. Some of what has seeded itself, such as Erigeron karvinskianus along a path edge, is worth keeping, and some of it is not. The visit is where those calls get made, plant by plant, with you standing next to him. You do not have to be there, though if you know the garden and have views on it, the visit is better with you in it.

He will also say plainly if something should go. In an overgrown garden, taking the right plants out is often the biggest single improvement available.

The report

After the visit, Paul writes up what he found. The report is a written document, not a set of photographs. It names the plants, says what to do with each one and when, and reads as instructions you or your gardener can work from.

It covers:

• what is working and should be left alone

• what should stay, and what it needs, including pruning, feeding, watering or moving to a better position

• what should go

• plant health, from pests and disease to whether things are getting the water and feed they need

• pruning, including which plants, when and how hard

• how the garden will develop as it matures, and what that means for the decisions you make now

• which of the self-sown plants are weeds and which are not

• soil and drainage, as a visual read rather than a technical survey

• the actions to take, in order, for you or whoever gardens for you

The report follows the visit and is designed to be picked up in a year's time and still make sense.

If you make the changes and want Paul to look again a season or two later, that is a second Appraisal. There is no rolling programme attached to the first one.

Who the Garden Appraisal is for

• someone who has taken on an established garden, often with a new house

• someone with an overgrown garden who does not know where to start

• someone standing in front of a shrub, asking whether it should come out

• someone who knows their garden well and wants a fresh pair of eyes on it, without commissioning a full design

What a Garden Appraisal is not

It is not a garden design. If the layout itself is the problem, because the beds are in the wrong place or the garden needs restructuring, Garden Design is the fuller route. Paul will say so on the visit if he thinks a garden needs redesigning. The Appraisal does not exist to sell one.

It is not a planting scheme. If the read shows that the planting needs taking apart and rebuilding rather than editing, that is Planting Design, and the report will say so.

It is not ongoing care. Paul advises, and the work is done by you or your gardener. If you want Paul returning through the seasons, that is Stewardship, the ongoing relationship, and he will say on the visit whether it is appropriate for your garden. An Appraisal is one visit.

It is not a survey. There is no soil analysis and no drainage report. Paul looks at the ground, reads what the plants are telling him about it and says what that means.