| Earthly Comforts – Town Gardening Services Garden Moments Directory |
| From this … | … To This |
| Introduction to Garden Moments Earthly Comforts works for an eclectic and diverse client and garden base. While l perform maintenance on many of the established gardens l work on now, sometimes the maintenance results after long-term project work over several months. A new client’s garden often requires a certain amount of botanical archaeology to be carried out first, as l rarely take on a new garden that requires basic upkeep and generalised maintenance from the get-go. This is primarily due to taking on gardens that have been neglected, forgotten, lost, or new to the house owners. Occasionally, l take on overgrown and overwhelmed gardens that once had a gardener attend, but that may have been some time ago. So, the garden needs much repair work before regular maintenance can commence. Many of the gardens worked on are long games played slowly regarding restoring and recovering. When l work on a new project, my main direction and aim is to get to know the garden space first and foremost and then the clients. Therefore, l would like to see the garden through the year’s four seasons. This allows me to understand what the garden truly needs. Over that period, l would also get to know the clients and what they wanted from their garden. I hope you enjoy the series and my client’s gardens, too. Thanks for reading. Rory Matier |
| 22nd December 2023 A job well done. The Monster bush covered three client gardens and was owned by none of them. The actual owner of the invasive ivy bush got a total of fifteen tons of cut green waste carted away and it cost him nothing and yet he too was a winner as the back area is now completely clear. The white sack left at the base of the tidy image [ Success, walls cleared … ] didn’t belong to us, which is why it was left in situ. |
| Client Spruce Recovery Brief Cut away invasive and intrusive ivy hedge from neighbouring garden. |
| With Client Spruce, l could finally close the Rustic Project down. Rustic’s mighty monster bush had been responsible for the invasive overgrowth over the walls of Paprika and Hydrangea, as well as Spruce. One thirty-year-old unmanaged and poorly maintained ivy bush that belonged to someone else had invaded, overwhelmed, and suffocated three gardens in a tiny area. It had become an eyesore for the gardens it attacked and attached its foliage to. Sadly, the owner of the mismanaged ivy bush wouldn’t accept financial liability for the overgrown shrub but was more than willing to allow his neighbours to pay for the removal and cut back, which they did for them to free their garden spaces back up again. Yet, having said this, Paprika refused to pay to remove the overhanging ivy and expected another client of mine to cough up, which he did. In the end, of the three gardens affected, two clients paid for the entire thing to be extracted from the walls but not the owner. The final part of the overhanging mixed ivies bush was cut back to or off the walls for client Spruce. The client there had lived with it the longest of all the cutbacks. In the nineties, he had seen the original small ivy bushes planted behind his house against the bicycle shed – and had watched it grow and grow and continue to grow as the beanstalk did for Jack! When the last of the ivy was cut back and dragged away, to say Spruce was relieved was an understatement; he was thrilled. He could finally see over his balcony again. The cut required the services of the arborist and a gardener again. The reason l used an arborist was for two main reasons: 1] the walls are eight to nine feet high surrounding the gardens, and you need good ladders to get up to that height, and 2] the foliage of that type of overgrown shrubbery is way denser than that of an average bush cut so l needed someone with much heavier equipment that could slice through the branches with speed and ease over that of the more sluggish or more minor equipment l have for average hedge cuts. We made good time with the cutting and were lucky to have a dry morning. This made cutting dense greenery easier than when it is wet. Of all the significant cutbacks, client Spruce was the easiest. Paprika’s cutback was minor in consideration, but the Rustic/Hydrangea was the hardest as it was the largest. However, Spruce, whilst still of size, was a quicker cut. It took us two hours tops. Cut back, drag off, and out to the van. Tidy up our mess, load it, and tie it to the truck. The arborist took it away to be dumped at the municipal green waste tip. I say ‘our mess’ because there was a half-ton sack filled with mess from the bush owner, filled with old garden waste. A previous gardener had filled it a decade ago or so before we began our cuts. Given the stage of green decomposition it had undergone and considering that the arborist and I had been the only gardeners working on tackling the overgrown shrubbery, it had to have been sitting there for some time. However, neither of us felt any more obligated to remove the sack of waste, considering that the owner had yet to pay for his bush to be cut back. But it is now, finally, a job finished. |
| Thanks for reading. |
Earthly Comforts 
Difficult jobs, but very rewarding when finished, Rory!
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Hey Jaye, yes that’s the beauty of finishing – and feeling rewarded 🙂
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Weather permitting, I am hoping for quite a bit of that rewarding feeling this year, Rory…
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Well l hope you get that Jaye 🙂
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You mean those people let someone elses stuff invade their yards for years? Hell, I would have been out there with my clippers from the get-go cutting that stuff off…
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Yes they should have tackled it before, but as is sometimes the case, it’s not always a straight forward case.
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The longer people wait to maintain their garden, the longer it takes to make it presentable as with anything in life.
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Very True 🙂
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