What kind of glamorous things does an image consultant and style blogger do on her weekends? Attend fashion shows …. fancy soirees …. hobnob with the beautiful people?
Not this one!
What I have spent many of my weekends over the past two years doing is a massive garden makeover. Over the past two years, my husband and I have toiled away in our garden giving it a massive facelift and total makeover.
Before and After – front garden makeover
Before – left – overgrown plants and trees – After – right – a more pleasant and decorative garden
We are lucky to live in a temperate climate, which means no snow, so don’t have to worry about everything being buried under a mountain of snow each winter and can design our garden around many evergreens.
Before renovating our house we realised that we’d need to get rid of a lot of overgrown plants to make room for deliveries of wood, bricks and other building supplies.
During the renovations with the garden partly decimated
You may have seen the garden change over the past 3 years from my outfit photos which I mostly take outside my house.
Front Garden Before the Renovations
The first thing we did after the renovation was finished was to build a front path to the front door, as before you had to come down the driveway to get to the front door, and it’s a slippery slope in the rain.
The new front path – 9 months apart as the new plants start filling in the space under the liquid amber tree
This took a lot of digging and back-breaking labour as the soil is clay, and the large liquid amber tree that is in the front garden has a lot of roots that were in the way of our new path. You can imagine me hacking away with a pickaxe day after day to dig down to lay the pavers.
The next job was to clear the rest of the garden and flatten it as it sloped down as we are on a slope, and then dig a lot of holes to sink in the fence posts for what I call our secret garden that is in front of our bedroom window.
The secret garden starting to take shape
The design of the garden was partly around the fact that I take my outfit photos out the front most of the time, and so I wanted a bunch of different locations to be able to utilise in them!
And then it was weekend after weekend of planting. Every weekend I’d head down to our local plant nursery, buy a boot load of plants, then come home and plant them and still feel like the garden was very empty.
The secret garden a year on!
What a difference a year makes as the plants have grown and the garden is looking lush now!
We added a few fish and a solar pump fountain to circulate the water and keep the mosquitos from breeding in our pond.
What a difference a year makes!
We are now the happy maintainers of this gorgeous garden that is really taking shape! I love it in the spring as the weeping cherry trees are in blossom and the leaves are re-appearing on the liquid amber tree.
Now that the front garden is complete, we are working on the side and back gardens and there is still so much to do!
Love it- we’ll done!
Thanks so much!
Your hard work paid off. The front garden looks beautiful. Love the design of the ‘secret garden’ and fencing, it looks great also.
It would be amusing to see a pickaxe as outfit photo accessory!
Best of luck with the continuing garden renovations.
Must remember to get that accessory!
Gorgeous Imogen! Really stunning and I know the amount of labor and love you have put in as we are currently busy doing the same. Your secret garden is to die for. Thank you for sharing. Catia
Thanks so much – you’d get just how much work goes into it!
It looks so lovely! Well done! Enjoy!
It looks lovely, Imogen. Hard work has paid off. Nice to know the style pronciples work so well in a different context
Lovely, and a nice reward for all that work.
Love what you’ve done with the front landscaping. And you’re pretty cute too!
Oh wow your garden has come a long way ! How beautiful. I do gardening on weekends, mostly raking endlessly…
That’s autumn for me when the leaves fall off the big tree in the front garden!
How beautiful! I agree your hard work paid off handsomely. Love the “secret garden” and all the plants which seem so exotic to me in North America.
I so enjoy your posts, and as much as I love fashion, it’s nice to see a little slice into your life every now and then.
One of the joys of living in a place with no snow is that you can have a much wider range of plants!
Congratulations Imogen on completing such a huge project. It looks beautiful. My husband and I have been working on our own large outdoor project. I hope it turns out as wonderful as yours.
Thanks Carol – we still have a lot to go, but I’m loving it!
Oh wow! You’ve worked so hard! I love the secret garden.
Thanks Tracey, we see the secret garden from our bedroom window and it gives us that bit of privacy.
Where do you get the energy from. What a wonderful transformation
Sometimes I wonder too! I think I must have some Dory in me … just keep swimming swimming swimming….