New homes: Starter ideas for your first garden

Peter Dowdall advises new home owners to stop and reflect before diving into planting

New home, first garden steps: Before you think about planting or even your topsoil, think about your subsoil.

Buying a new home is exciting. Fresh walls, clean lines, that sense of possibility … and then you step outside.

What greets most new homeowners is not really a garden, but a surface. A rectangle of turf, fencing, perhaps a patio already laid in a position that seemed convenient at the time. It looks finished, it isn’t.