10 simple ideas for cluttered corners and neglected garden spaces

More easy ways of re-vamping and renovating those neglected corners and difficult spaces in your garden. Ideas from my garden and others.
00:00 We’ve all got cluttered parts of the garden!
00:15 Video with ideas for areas close to the house: https://youtu.be/NnGpx2lQs7E
00:43 The difficult shady corner video: https://youtu.be/C6F6Reobj78
01:01 Why seating is the perfect option for a neglected area or shady space
01:18 Create a new ‘destination’
01:47 Move things around your garden for a fresh new look
02:33 Transform a ‘practical’ area by adding a focal point
03:02 Leave a patch go ‘wild’
03:10 The Book of Wilding – A Practical Guide to Rewilding Big and Small: https://amzn.to/3UnwS8V (affiliate link)
04:01 Plant a ‘green manure’ while you’re deciding what to do with a border
04:43 Add a surprisingly grand element to a practical or empty area
04:58 Add a garden ornament or sculpture to an empty space
05:34 Use paint to bring elements together or ‘hide’ ugly ones
05:50 How to design a wide shallow backyard video: https://youtu.be/AYWpiVp-pzE
06:17 What to do with a slope
06:27 How to create a rock garden video: https://youtu.be/whDfzvMn9Zw
06:39 How to create a stumpery video: https://youtu.be/vqQMq_RuiAs
07:12 Video on how to revamp the garden near the house: https://youtu.be/NnGpx2lQs7E

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We’ve all got some of those cluttered areas –  areas where nothing seems to grow, which doesn’t   seem to work, or where we want to change how we’re  using the garden. It’s Alexandra here from The   Middle-Sized Garden YouTube channel and blog,  and this is the second of two videos. And the  

First one dealt with how you design and revamp  the area of the garden closest to the house,   because that’s what you see when you look out  of the window or walk outside. But all around  

Gardens – if they’re of any size at all, and even  if they’re quite small – you find that corners   just gather clutter. And we’ve revamped several  of our corners over the last few years. So I’ll   cover those ideas that we’ve used, plus ideas  I’ve seen in other gardens and at the shows. Now  

We’ve got something we call the difficult shady  corner, and there’s a video about that which I’ll   put in the description below, because after  a pergola was rotted and taken away, I looked   at 10 different options for it, which included  things like a shed, a sculpture, seating, a pond,  

A wildlife area and so on. But in the end what we  decided was seating. And I’m so glad that we did,   because actually what seating does – even in any  size of a garden – putting a seat in a different  

Part of it gives you a different view of your  garden. So I really enjoy sitting in this corner   and just seeing how different the garden looks and  feels. The other thing that seating does is that   it creates a destination in your garden. Suddenly,  somewhere that wasn’t really anywhere is a place  

Where you go with a cup of coffee or a drink.  And in the practical part of our garden where   the sheds are there was a great of clutter and I  just simply couldn’t get around to ever tidying  

It up. But eventually I tidied it up, and I added  a table and two chairs, and it just has made it   somewhere to go, and it looks so much better. And  there’s no need to necessarily buy anything new.  

Because the other idea I would say is that you can  actually achieve quite a lot of revamping simply   by moving things around the garden. The table  over in this corner actually was on our terrace,  

And the chairs are two of the chairs from a set  of eight which is in another corner of the garden.   And in the middle of our parterre we had a topiary  spiral. Now we moved that into what we call the  

Difficult shady corner. And actually topiary is  a very good thing to give structure to a shady   corner because quite a lot of topiary does quite  well in the shade – things like box, holm oak,  

Holly and privet. And then we had a sundal in  the middle of that part of the garden for a bit,   but when we had the pergola put in I then thought  “well, what am I going to do with the sundal?” And  

Then of course I thought that one way of making a  practical area feel like a proper garden area of   its own, is to give it a focal point. So I moved  the sundal to the center of the veg beds. There  

Was some landscaping involved in that, because we  had to cut the edge off the corner of each of the   four beds to give us enough room to actually  walk round the sundial. But I’m very pleased  

Now. I feel that instead of having veg beds, I’ve  got a potager, or perhaps I could grow it as a cut   flower garden, a cottage garden. Or indeed last  year, what I did with it – and this is another  

Thing you can do if you’ve got a bear patch –  is I left it completely wild. Now rewilding is   obviously a hot topic at the moment, and Isabella  Tree, who’s one of the pioneers of rewilding,   says in her book The Book of Wilding that actually  it’s not about just letting your garden go.  

Because if you just stop doing something then  the most invasive plants will take over, and   you’ll actually have a reduction in biodiversity  rather than an increase. So we all live in managed   spaces, and even a rewilded garden will be a  managed garden. However just for three months last  

Summer I did absolutely nothing in these beds, and  I kept thinking “oh, we must get around to doing   something, I must plant some veg” etc. In fact I  turned around in June and suddenly the beds were  

Full of poppies and feverfew and cerinthe, and  it was really pretty. So it worked very well for   me. But there is one word of warning, and that is  that actually bare earth does attract weeds, and   sometimes they’re beautiful weeds like poppies,  but if they’re weeds you don’t want to attract,  

Then the other thing you can do with the patch of  bare earth – while you’re trying to decide what   its ultimate future is – is to add a green manure.  Green manure are plants that you grow from seed,  

They improve the structure of your soil, and  when they break down they add fertility and   nutrients back into the soil. I was sent a couple  of packets of green manure by Thompson and Morgan,  

And so I scattered them across two of the beds and  then rake them over. It only took about 10 minutes   and now those beds are covered in something lovely  and green, and it’s no longer so inviting to any  

Passing weed. When I’m ready to replant the beds,  I will cut down the green manure and either leave   them on the top to rot down, or dig them in, and  both ways will restore nutrition to the earth.  

One of the other things you can do to make an  area that’s practical feel a bit more special,   is actually to put something unexpectedly grand  or gorgeous in it. For example, a chandelier in   a greenhouse or a particularly nice bench in a  shed. And if you’ve got a bare and boring part of  

The garden, then what about a garden ornamental  sculpture. Of course sculpture can cost quite   a lot, but actually you can often make it up  yourself. In this garden the owner had several   pieces of Corten steel, cut and arranged to look  like sculpture, and it’s really transformed this  

Bare bit of hedge. And at Doddington Place Gardens  this twisted metal sculpture actually was a part   of the fence, and a vehicle crashed into it, and  instead of disposing of the twisted metal they  

Painted it red, and then they used it to create  a focal point in a bare piece of open ground. And   of course that brings me to a pot of paint can  work wonders. If you’ve got a clutter of sheds,  

Log stores, bin stores, whatever, in a corner  somewhere, then actually if you paint it all   the same colour it will just look so much neater  and tidier. In this wide shallow garden designed   by Posy Gentles, she loses the shed simply by  painting it the same dark color as the fence.  

And of course because it’s a wide shallow garden,  the fence and the shed are actually quite close to   you when you look out the window. So it’s worked  beautifully to lose it, and we’ve used the same  

Trick with our log store bins and back gate. Just  by painting them all the same color they look so   much better. That paint’s about eight years old  now, so it is looking a bit shabby. One of the  

Most difficult parts of a garden to plant up is a  sloping area, and you might just have a couple of   feet of slope. And there are two things you could  actually do with a slope which would make it just  

Seem a bit different and a bit more interesting.  And one is if it’s a sunny slope put a rock garden   there. And I’ve got a video about how to do rock  gardens which I’ll put in the description below.  

The other thing you can do if it’s a shady slope  is kind of somehow go for a woodland garden feel,   and make it a stumpery. A stumpery is when you  get bits of cut log or old tree stumps or even  

Interesting stumps from shrubs, and then you  arrange them – it’s very good for wildlife – the   wood will slowly rot down. But whether you’re  doing a rockery or a stumpery, what it does with  

A slope is it creates little pockets of planting.  So you put the rocks in, or the stump in, and then   you can plant plants behind them, and they’re not  so likely to get washed away if it rains. So if  

You’re revamping various corners of your garden,  then don’t forget the area just outside the house,   because that is the area you’ll see the  most. And so do check out this video here,   which will have all the ideas we have for things  that are close to the house and what you need to  

Bear in mind when you’re revamping an area close  to the house. And thank you for watching. Goodbye!