Time to take stock of your garden - By garden designers Lesley Hegarty and Robert Webber

As garden designers we are used to assessing both the design of gardens and their performance. But you too could exercise our ruthlessness in your own  garden. There is a time in every relationship when there has to be a bit of soul searching and frankness! Your relationship with your garden is no different. A good time for this rigorous approach is towards the end of the year.

Let’s start with the basics. Does the space actually work?
Did your garden stand the test as the all important extra room?
Was the patio large enough for the family meal with friends?
Do football and your herbaceous border side by side really work?

Gardens are for people as well as plants. But, with the passage of time and our busy lives, our gardens can get out of key with us.

Have an honest look at what you really want and whether you have time and space for it all. Then prioritise. Time spent sitting in the garden is just as valid as time spent looking after it. Maybe an ornamental potager is a big ask in terms of maintenance, but if you employed a few more aids or techniques it would still be viable. Mulch works wonders for time management, and raised beds save the back.

Does your garden work as an aesthetic experience? Are the lines of the garden actually pleasing to you? Do they express your personality? Think gentle curves if you’re informal and angular, Mondrian geometry if you’re not. Most often, simple and understated works best. In the harsh light of winter, it is the bones of the garden which will reign supreme and where true beauty lies, as with human beings.

But, if we are talking seasonal sassiness, did your borders last the season, firing off salvo after salvo? Will they die gracefully with autumn’s afterglow and will you see the flicker of embers in winter’s gloom? With global warming we are now more likely to be outside then and will need the cheer of flower and especially the deeply intoxicating scents at which winter flowering shrubs excel.

When restocking try to ignore both impulse buys and fashion - often these underperform and don’t fit in. It is better to metre high, which has puce flowers in summer’ rather than just making the desired commercial response to the garden centre’s weekend temptations and then trying working out how they fit into your garden. Overall, think about the colour values and shapes of leaves and stems at least as much as about flower.

Do the needs of fashion even have to be met at all? Styling is, after all, not design. A trio of indigo blue pots or those stainless steel spirals you lugged round Chelsea last year did not transform your garden after all and now look dated. Terracotta pots, however cheap, and wooden obelisks, however expensive, would have fulfilled the same function and withstood the test of time.

Aside from the design of your garden how did YOU perform? Did you mulch and feed, deadhead to get that second crop of bloom, do ‘the Chelsea chop’ to delay flowering and reduce height? Did you stake before the plants flopped rather than after? If we are honest 99% of us could up our game on some of these fronts. Even some idle titivating would be a good bet - a New Year’s resolution to walk the garden once a week with secateurs until you have filled your arms with debris could work wonders. No one could call that hard work since, if you are really dextrous, you could carry a glass of wine around as well.

Above all be radical. Plants are living things and so outgrow their space, but they do respond generously to both commonsense and toughness. A wintertime prune can restore both line and lightness to the garden, as well as recover lost views. In our greed to have it all, we gardeners can sometimes cram in too many and too disparate elements. So another resolution might be SIMPLICITY and REPETITION.

Amongst these tough decisions do note your successes as well as your failures. These might be unforeseen - for us this year it was Potentilla ‘Gibson’s Scarlet’ clambering into Lychnis trosanguinea so that, for a few days brilliant red and shocking magenta were superimposed on each other! An acquired taste - but one to remember for clients who like things vibrant. Take advantage of these ‘accidents’ which can be repeated.

But sometimes you need someone else to tell you ‘That Daphne may be in the wrong place but sadly, it will die if you move it!’ If in doubt, call in an expert.