Every garden project needs a starting point, a moment where you stop, look around, and take an honest photograph before you get carried away with ideas. This is that moment.

These pictures were taken on the same evening, walking every angle of the garden with my phone. No staging, no tidying. Just the garden as it actually is: a rectangle of worn, dry grass giving way to bare earth, a patio that’s seen better days, two raised beds that have hosted some early experiments in vegetable growing, and the quiet sense that something could happen here.

I wanted to document all of it, every unglamorous corner, because I know from experience that the “before” photographs are the ones you treasure most once things start to change.

The view from upstairs

From upstairs you get the only true overhead view available without a drone. The garden reads as a rectangle, wider than it feels at ground level, with the two raised beds sitting slightly off-centre to the left. They’re a reminder of lockdown ambitions: vegetables once grew there, tended with the kind of focus that only confinement can muster. Now they’re empty, waiting. The rest is open space. Potential, depending on how you choose to look at it, and depending, too, on whether you’re ready to tend them again.

From the gate

Standing at the gate is how most people will first experience this garden, either arriving or leaving. Right now it reads as open and a little sparse. The raised beds are visible from here: rectangular, weathered, full of possibility. They’ve been dormant long enough. The boundary with the neighbour’s garage gives a clear line to work with on that side, and the beds give us a framework for structure. Both are fixed points in a space that’s otherwise blank.

From the patio

This is the daily view — the one you get standing outside the back door with something warm to drink, looking out and thinking. Right now it’s mostly ground. But that also means there’s nothing to undo, nothing to work around. A genuinely blank canvas.

From the back corners

Walking to the back corners gives a different sense of scale entirely. The house suddenly looks further away than expected. Both views show how open, and how exposed, the space currently is. But they also show something else: the raised beds, solid and patient, a thread of continuity from before the garden fell quiet. No canopy yet, no fresh structure beyond what’s already there. Very little to catch the eye. That’s both the challenge and the invitation.

From the back fence

Standing at the back fence and turning to face the house is the classic garden designer’s viewpoint, the one that tells you what the space is actually doing. The house is the dominant feature, the raised beds break up the left side like a promise kept on pause, and the patio sits quietly to the right. Those beds grew food once. They can again. Everything in between is waiting.

From the house

And finally: the view from the house itself. The one that will greet me every morning through the glass, and the one I’ll watch slowly change over the coming months and seasons. Right now it’s honest and unadorned. The raised beds sit there, ready to become more than decoration again. This is a garden waiting to become itself, and to return to what it once was, only better.

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I’ll keep coming back to these photographs. Not just as a record of where things started, but as a reminder of what the space looked like before any new intention had been tested, before any plant had been chosen again. The raised beds tell their own story in these images: dormant, but not forgotten. The chaos, the good kind, has been postponed long enough. It’s time to let it properly begin.

Next up: the plan.