What Islington gardens are like
Most of what we look after here is the classic Victorian terrace back garden: five to seven metres wide, twenty-odd long, walled or fenced on three sides, and reached through the house. Shade from the terrace opposite for half the day, a lawn that’s more moss than grass by March, a privet or laurel hedge that was planted in the 1980s and has opinions, and borders nobody’s touched since the last tenant.
North of Holloway Road the plots get a little bigger and there’s more London clay to deal with; Barnsbury and Canonbury have some of the borough’s larger walled gardens, often with mature trees that drop everything in October. Highbury has the squares, and the front gardens that get judged by neighbours.
What we do here
- Regular maintenance — weekly or fortnightly: mow, edge, weed, deadhead, tidy, sweep. The garden looks looked-after and you didn’t spend Sunday on it.
- Hedges — privet, laurel, box, yew and the occasional leylandii that’s blocking a neighbour’s light. Shaped, reduced, or brought back under control. We avoid cutting during bird-nesting season (March to July) unless it’s a light trim and we’ve checked.
- Lawns — scarify, aerate, feed, overseed. Islington lawns are shaded and compacted; they recover, but they need doing properly once, then keeping up.
- Clearance — moved into a place with a jungle out the back? One visit, everything cut back and removed, then a plan for keeping it that way.
Practical things
Access is through the house nine times out of ten, so we come with kit that fits through a hallway, wear overshoes, and put sheets down. Parking is what it is — we plan for it. We take green waste away rather than relying on the borough’s subscription bin.