Planting & sowing
- Bare-root roses and hedging heeled in before bud-break
- Sweet peas and cosmos sown under glass
- Congested hosta and geranium clumps lifted and divided
- First mulch of composted bark across the borders
In season now — tulips & apple blossom
The studio
We garden with the calendar,
not against it.
Evergreen Gardens is a small design-and-maintenance studio. We draw a garden on paper once, then spend years in it — planting, editing, cutting back, and letting a few things run where they clearly want to. A border is never really finished; it is only in a different month.
Most of what we do is the quiet kind of work. Knowing the wisteria wants pruning twice a year, that tulips look best planted late and deep, that a bed usually reads better with one shrub taken out than three more crammed in. We look after roughly thirty gardens, and we visit each one through every season it has.
— Elena Voss, founder
Through the year
The work moves with the weather
Four visits a season, give or take. Here is roughly what a year in one of our gardens looks like, from the first bare-root planting to the last job before the frost.
Pruning & watering
- Wisteria whips cut back to five buds
- Roses and sweet peas dead-headed weekly to keep them flowering
- Drip lines charged and timers set for the dry spells
- Box and yew given their one clean trim of the year
Structure & bulbs
- Tulip, allium and narcissus bulbs planted in drifts
- Dahlia tubers lifted, dried and stored frost-free
- Leaf-mould gathered and stacked for next year's compost
- Deciduous hedges laid and shaped while dormant
Winter prep
- Tree ferns and tender salvias wrapped in fleece and straw
- Apples, pears and wisteria given their winter prune
- Ponds netted and pumps drained before the first hard frost
- Paths, edges and structures repaired in the quiet months
Selected gardens
Drag to see the change
Three gardens we designed and now maintain. Pull the handle across to compare the day we first walked in with the same view a few seasons on.
Hartsfield · Walled garden
The Victorian kitchen garden, replanted
A neglected walled plot reworked into a working potager — espaliered pears on the south wall, box-edged beds, and gravel paths that drain.
Ashcombe Road · Town garden
A steep back garden, terraced into rooms
A shaded slope cut into three level terraces with reclaimed stone, a fern-lined water rill, and shade planting of hellebores, epimedium and hart's-tongue.
Lower Marsh Farm · Two acres
Tired paddock to meadow & orchard
Two acres of grazed grass turned over to a native wildflower meadow, mown in paths, with a young orchard of local apple varieties — Ashmead's Kernel and Egremont Russet.
Who tends your garden
One gardener who never quite leaves
Elena trained at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and spent a decade tending private gardens across the Borders before starting the studio in 2011. She still walks every garden herself — secateurs in her coat pocket — before deciding what, if anything, needs doing.
She works with four gardeners she has known for years, a van, and a stubborn belief that the best gardens are the ones somebody keeps turning up to. No sub-contractors, no seasonal crews you have never met.
Elena Voss
Founder & head gardener