Does Your Garden Need Decluttering?

Does your garden look and feel cluttered? Perhaps you’ve got too many ornaments and pieces of equipment? Or perhaps there are too many plants fighting for space?

Just as it’s important to reduce clutter inside your home, it’s also important to reduce clutter outside.

Does Your Garden Need Decluttering?

A few good reasons to declutter your garden include:

• Making it more presentable and welcoming to guests (no-one wants to be embarrassed by their garden)
• Giving you more space to socialize and more space for kids to play
• Making your garden more peaceful so that you can more easily relax in it
• Reducing time and effort spent maintaining it
• Making your home more attractive to buyers if you’re planning on selling up

Below are just some of the different ways in which you can declutter your garden.

Trim back unruly plants

It’s important that plants aren’t given the freedom to grow out of control. Hedges, trees and shrubs all need to be cut back occasionally. You may be able to do this yourself by pruning away stray foliage or by using a hedge trimmer. If it’s a tree that’s infringing on your garden space, you may want to hire a tree surgeon to cut back any rogue branches. 

Don’t have the time to constantly prune plants? There are low maintenance narrow plants that are great for this purpose – this includes plants like libertia and ferns. You can also try espalier trees and various vertical growing plants.

Create defined borders

It can be worth separating your garden into defined zones. This could include a social area (either patio or decking), a lawn and possibly plant beds around the perimeter. 

You should then make sure that no plants or items are crossing into the wrong zones. Maintain clear lawn perimeters by trimming the edges – you can use these Rover products to maintain the perimeters of your lawn. You may even be able to create a physical border made up of stones or mini-fence. Make sure that any plants in the flower beds do not protrude too far into your lawn. Similarly make sure that they don’t hang over too far into your patio or decking. You should also keep all play equipment on the lawn and all outdoor furniture on your patio or decking. 

Doing this will help you to keep your garden more tidy and structured. By creating designated spaces for certain plants and items, you can prevent them from taking over your garden. 

Throw out broken pots and ornaments

Are you a hoarder of pots and ornaments? When deciding what to keep and what to throw away, consider the condition of all these garden items. Damaged pots and broken ornaments could be letting down the appearance of your garden. Throw these items away and you could find that you free up a lot of space. 

If you’ve got a small garden, try to avoid large pots and large ornaments. Larger items are likely to clutter up your garden faster the more you accumulate.

Consider what outdoor furniture you need

Too many chairs or tables could also start to clutter up your garden. Be realistic about how much outdoor furniture you need and place it strategically.

Consider space-saving options if you’ve only got a small garden. Fold-away chairs for guests could be a better option than fixed benches so that you can free up more space when you haven’t got guests. You may even be able to look into a custom outdoor lounge suite that can fit snugly into oddly shaped alcoves or tight corners.

Sort through play equipment

If you’ve got kids, it’s possible that you may have lots of outdoor play equipment. This could include trampolines, push-along cars and sports equipment. Consider which pieces of equipment actually get played with – as your kids get older, it is likely that certain items will get neglected. Getting rid of this equipment could help to free up space. You should similarly get rid of anything that is broken.

If you’ve got a small garden, you may want to be wary of buying big equipment like trampolines or climbing frames. You don’t want something big and bulky taking up half your garden.

Clear out your shed

Sheds can often become cluttered with tools and equipment. Make sure that you’re not clinging onto half-used pots of paint or timber offcuts from five years ago – get rid of anything that isn’t of actual use.

There are many ways of organizing a shed in order to minimize clutter. This could include adding shelves and tubs or even adding racks for bikes. Consider whether this is necessary for your shed.