Maintenance · 6 min read
Reclaiming an Overgrown Garden: Where to Start
By House of Horticulturists · 17 July 2026
Whether you've inherited it with a house move or life simply got in the way, an overgrown garden is daunting, brambles, waist-high grass, hedges gone feral. The good news: there's a sensible order to reclaiming one, and it's rarely as bad underneath as it looks.
Survey before you slash
Before cutting anything, walk the garden and work out what's actually there. Overgrown gardens often hide good bones, established shrubs, decent paving, a sound fence, that are worth keeping. Also check timing: birds commonly nest in overgrown hedges and shrubs through spring and summer, so heavy clearance of those is better done outside nesting season.
The order that works
- ›Clear access first, paths and a working route through.
- ›Cut back the ground layer: grass, brambles, weeds.
- ›Tackle hedges and shrubs, renovate what's worth keeping, remove what isn't.
- ›Deal with the waste as you go, or it swamps the garden again.
- ›Only then decide what the reclaimed garden should become.
The waste is half the job
People underestimate how much material an overgrown garden produces, a serious clearance generates far more than a council bin handles. Our garden clearance and waste removal service exists largely because hauling a garden's worth of brambles to the tip is nobody's idea of a weekend.
After the clearance
A cleared garden is a blank slate, and the moment to decide what happens next. Sometimes that's simply a regular maintenance schedule so it never gets away again; sometimes it's the start of a proper redesign. We're often called to overgrown gardens after a house purchase in areas like Worcester Park and New Malden, and the transformation from jungle to usable garden is one of the most satisfying jobs there is.
Frequently asked questions
Anything from a day for heavy overgrowth in a small garden to several days for a large or badly neglected plot. The waste removal is often as big a job as the cutting.
