Professional Gardening Services in Penge

The six weeks after a daffodil finishes flowering decide whether it flowers again the following spring. That is the period in which the leaves are refilling the bulb, and it is also the point at which most people mow them off, knot them up or pull them out because the grass has started to look scruffy. A good many lawns and verges in SE20 were planted with bulbs by somebody two or three owners ago, and the display has thinned a little every year since for that single reason.

Which parts of a garden suit being left long

Naturalising only works where an area can stand uncut from late winter until midsummer without anyone minding. The strip beneath a boundary tree, the bank beside a path, the awkward corner behind a shed and the verge along a drive all qualify. The patch of lawn a family actually walks on does not. Snowdrops, aconites, crocus, narcissus, camassia and the smaller fritillaries settle in and spread; highly bred tulips give one good season and then dwindle. Similar planting in gardens further east is covered by our gardening service in Woolwich.

Depth, drifts and the difference both make

A bulb wants roughly three times its own height of soil above it. Planted too shallow it makes leaves, splits into blind offsets and works its way towards the surface within a few years. In turf the practical method is a bulb planter that lifts a plug of grass, or a narrow slit cut with a spade for the small ones, with the turf trodden firmly back afterwards. Scattering a handful and planting them where they land avoids the regimented look, and a drift reads far better when it thins out at its edges rather than stopping in a line.

Cutting a naturalised area at the right moments

Foliage stays until it has yellowed and flopped, which is around six weeks after flowering and usually means the middle of June for narcissus. The first cut then takes everything down in one pass, and the arisings are raked off and removed rather than left lying. That last step matters more than it sounds: grass rotting where it fell feeds the soil, and fertility favours coarse grasses over bulbs and fine flowering species. A second cut in early autumn keeps the sward short going into winter, which is when snowdrops and aconites need the light at ground level. A mown path through the middle makes the whole thing read as deliberate rather than neglected.

What digs bulbs up before they ever appear

Crocus corms and tulips are frequently lifted by squirrels within days of planting, and the giveaway is a scatter of loose soil beside a neat hole. Pinning wire mesh over newly planted ground for the first few weeks, until it has settled and the scent has gone, deals with most of that. Narcissus are left alone by almost everything, which is why they persist in old gardens when nothing else has. Where something is already established under decking or in an outbuilding, the treatment side of it falls to experienced cockroach control in Penge.

Hay, arisings and the bulk nobody expects

A midsummer cut on an area that has stood since February produces a surprising quantity of coarse, half-dry material that will not fit in a bin and does not break down neatly on its own. Where a large area has been taken back in one operation, a vehicle load makes more sense than repeated trips, much as it would with professional man and van in Woolwich.

Paths, steps and the mess at the margins

Bulb foliage collapses over whatever sits next to it, so a path running alongside long grass spends several weeks under damp leaf litter. Left there it feeds an algal film that turns slippery at the first cold morning, and on porous stone the green works into the surface rather than sitting on top of it. Sweeping keeps the litter down through the season; lifting the staining itself is a separate operation handled by local pressure washing across Penge.

How a naturalised area is looked after

Work of this kind does not fit a fortnightly cutting round, because the point of it is that for most of the year nothing happens. It is arranged instead as a small number of timed visits: planting in early autumn, the main cut and clear in midsummer, a tidy as the season closes and edges kept crisp in between, priced by the length of the visit and the number of people on site. Where the mown edge is to run is best agreed on the ground rather than by description. The wider seasonal programme this sits inside is set out at professional garden clearance.