Gardening – Selling your garden

Following on from my recent column about shifting house and taking my plant collections with me, I thought it might be useful to write on the planning involved in making a well-designed and well-presented garden an asset to your property sale, instead of a liability. By now the property should be on the market, have a look online and see what you think of the job I’ve done – 13 Harbour View Road, Point Wells.

Firstly, I gave some thought to the structure of the garden and who the likely buyer might be. The price range in our area is not likely to attract many first home buyers, or property investors looking for a rental investment. At 1000sqm, the section is probably too large for elderly people looking to downsize.

The location is ideal, though, for mature buyers looking to move from the city. It’s also perfect for busy professionals with older children, as school buses stop nearby. So, a shrub-lined garden that gives lots of privacy, with gravel paths, bore-supplied irrigation system and raised gardens for ease of maintenance, lots of gravelled off-street parking for extended family or older children with cars, a small but useful area of lawn for the dog or visitors’ tents, plus a productive vegetable garden, seems to fit the brief.

Trees and shrubs growing up against the house are a no-no in my book, as that is a guaranteed way of generating mould, rot and moisture issues. So, all gardens were established away from the house, mostly lining the edges of the property to add privacy and sound reduction, with gravel paths between the garden and the house to improve drainage and avoid soggy soil underfoot, as the rich Point Wells peat is known to hold a lot of moisture after rain.

About a year ago, we had some large trees that were casting too much shade on the house removed or pruned, followed by some heavy hedge pruning. This gave time for regrowth before putting the property on the market, as well as producing a big pile of mulch – ideal to cover any bare soil and reduce weeds.

Fortunately, I have an edge of mondo on almost all my ornamental gardens, which acts as a barrier to birds flicking the mulch onto the paths – it’s a huge time-saver.

Even after my extensive plant collection was removed to the new property, there was still lots of lovely foliage throughout the gardens. All I needed to do was to add some relatively low maintenance perennials, such as white hydrangeas, canna lilies and iresine, to fill the gaps and provide a pop of colour over summer and a few bromeliads and some heliconia to add a bit of dramatic effect. Most of these were planted in autumn so they had plenty of time to establish, thicken up and cover the beds by midsummer.

By late spring I turned my efforts to planting out any remaining gaps with annuals such as the vibrantly coloured coleus. Job done, aside from dead-heading, watering, mowing the lawn and keeping an eagle eye out for any weeds until the property is sold.