Gardening Services Near You in Barnet

Raised stone features built into EN5 gardens in the 1960s and 1970s were seldom built with drainage in mind, and forty years on most read the same way: a mound of clay with boulders pressed into the surface, colonised by couch grass and a self-sown cotoneaster, the original alpines long gone. Rebuilding one is not a weeding job. The plants that belong in it need sharp drainage, and the ground under Barnet is heavy clay that holds water all winter.

Why the plants died in the first place

Mountain plants are not killed by cold. They are killed by wet sitting around the neck of the plant through a mild grey January. In their own conditions they spend winter dormant under snow, dry at the collar, in a gritty rubble that water runs straight through. Recreating that on clay means solving drainage, and nothing else matters until it is solved. A rockery made as a heap of garden soil with stones laid on top is a bog with decoration, and the plants sold for it rot within two seasons.

Building the profile from the bottom up

A working scree or raised alpine bed is made in layers. Ground is excavated rather than piled up, and a base of coarse rubble is laid so that water reaching it moves sideways and away. Above it goes the growing layer, and that layer is mostly mineral: heavy on grit and coarse sand, perhaps a quarter loam, deep enough for roots to run down. The top is dressed with stone chippings, and the dressing is the part most often skipped. It keeps each collar dry, stops rain splashing soil onto foliage, and holds moisture below while the surface stays arid.

Setting stone so that it looks like an outcrop

Stone is placed with its strata running the same way throughout and tilted slightly back into the slope, so rain is directed into the bed rather than off the face of it. Each piece is buried to roughly a third of its depth, which is the whole difference between rock and a pile of boulders. The pockets between stones take the planting, and they are filled and firmed properly, because a void under a stone collapses in the first hard frost and takes a plant down with it. Chippings migrate onto any adjoining paving whatever is done to prevent it, where they grind underfoot and mark the surface, and restoring that is dealt with by Fantastic Services.

Weeds decide whether it lasts

A gritty free-draining bed is close to impossible to weed once a perennial root system is into it, since the roots run beneath stones that cannot be lifted. Clearing every fragment of couch, bindweed and ground elder before construction is not a nicety, it is the difference between a ten-year feature and a three-year one. Where an existing feature is riddled with them, the honest answer is to take it apart, clean the ground and rebuild. Renewal at that scale a little further round the north of the borough is covered by our gardening in Cockfosters.

What dry stone attracts

Warm free-draining rubble is prime habitat, and that cuts both ways. Solitary bees and slow worms are worth having; ant colonies under the stones are less welcome, because their excavations undermine cushion plants and lift the chippings. Disturbance and grit topping usually move a nest on. Once ants or anything else have followed the warmth indoors, though, that is a different trade and a matter for professional cockroach control in Barnet.

Materials, spoil and access

The unglamorous part is logistics. Stone, grit and topsoil are heavy, and a modest bed swallows more of all three than anyone expects, while the clay dug out to make room has to leave. Most Barnet plots take a barrow through a side gate, which sets the pace of the job and is worth checking before anything is ordered. Spoil going off site is arranged through builders waste removal in Barnet.

How a project like this is quoted

Work of this type is priced on the area of the bed, the volume of material in and out, and the distance everything is carried, rather than by the hour. It is normally split across two visits, one to strip and prepare, one to build and plant, with a gap between so the base can be watched draining after rain. Gardens on comparable clay to the north-west are handled the same way by flexible gardening services in Watford. Agreeing a short planting list in advance avoids buying whatever happens to be in flower on the day, which is how most alpine beds end up with three plants and a lot of gaps, and the seasonal upkeep that follows is explained on nationwide garden maintenance services.