Gardening Services Near You in Forest Hill

Almost every established garden contains at least one plant in the wrong place: a shrub that has grown into a path, something planted for a small border that now blocks a window, or a good specimen sitting where a new opening is going in. Moving it is a real option far more often than people assume, but it is a job with a season, a method and a preparation period, and attempting it on a warm afternoon in July is the reason most attempts fail.

Deciding whether it will move at all

Age and species decide this, not size. Anything planted within the last three or four years moves easily. Deciduous shrubs, roses, hedging and young trees generally take it well. Plants that resent root disturbance will not forgive it at any age, and magnolia, daphne, ceanothus, cistus and brooms belong on that list; so does anything that has made a deep taproot. A shrub that has been in the same spot for twenty years can still be moved, but it will take three or four years to look like itself again, and a replacement might get there sooner.

Preparing the roots a season in advance

The single technique that separates a successful move from a dead plant costs nothing. A year, or at least a full season, ahead, a trench is cut around the plant at the radius the rootball will eventually have, the roots crossing it are severed cleanly, and the trench is backfilled with good soil. The plant responds by making a dense mass of fibrous roots inside that circle, which is what it will actually be lifted with. Done properly, the move itself becomes almost routine.

The window in the year

Deciduous plants move while dormant and leafless, from late autumn to early spring, ideally into soil that is moist but not frozen or waterlogged. Evergreens and conifers prefer the shoulders of the season, early autumn while the soil is still warm or mid-spring as growth starts, because they carry on losing water through their leaves all winter. Nothing moves in full leaf in summer, and nothing moves in a drought.

Lifting without losing the ball

The rootball is cut as a cylinder rather than dug as a hole, with the trench opened outside the marked line and the ball undercut from all sides until it can be tilted. A sheet or a piece of hessian slid underneath holds it together and gives two people something to lift by, and the ball stays wrapped from the moment it leaves the ground until it is in position. A ball that crumbles in transit has taken the fine roots with it. Old shrubs frequently sit over long-established runs and burrows, which become obvious once the plant is out, and anything that has spread from there toward the house is a matter for our pest control in Forest Hill.

The new hole, and the usual errors in it

The receiving hole is dug wide and no deeper than the ball is tall, so the plant sits at exactly the depth it grew before. On the clay common across SE23, a deep hole backfilled with rich compost becomes a sump that fills with water, so the backfill is the excavated soil with a modest improvement rather than a bucket of something luxurious. Soil is firmed in stages rather than trodden into a pan, and the whole thing is watered heavily at once to settle it, whatever the weather is doing.

The two summers that follow

A moved plant has a fraction of its root system and the same amount of top growth, so the first year is about water. Deep soakings at long intervals beat daily sprinkles. A mulch ring keeps the root zone cool and grass off it, low staking stops the ball rocking in wind while allowing the stem to flex, and on a large evergreen it is worth thinning the top by a quarter to bring it back into balance. Rootballs dragged across paving leave marks that outlast the job, and restoring the surface is work for trusted path and paving cleaning in Forest Hill.

Arranging a move

This work is quoted on the size of the rootball, the distance it has to travel and the access between the two positions, not on the height of the plant, because a metre of ball weighs more than most people imagine. Where plants are leaving with a household rather than moving across the garden, lifting them into pots a season beforehand and transporting them properly is arranged through trusted single item moves in South Norwood. The seasonal care that follows in the same garden is covered by our local team, and how visits are organised through the year is set out on fully insured lawn mowing.