Gardening: How do you tame a rampant garden?

Brambles are threatening to take over the Sheltons' borders. And then there's the bog...

Our rectory, a lovely well-built 1930s house, has a back garden measuring 64ft by 210ft. The part nearest the house is mostly lawn (the parish has provided a motor mower); the bottom 66ft is a mixture of bramble, nettle and fruit trees, ideal for children's dens, but also for trips to casualty.

There is a lot of amphibian life in the garden, mainly due to a section of the lawn - mostly moss - which is normally wet and, after heavy rain, can be ankle deep in water.

Our helpful churchwardens have driven back the borders, but they are still madly overgrown. The diocese (the property owner) is in seemingly endless correspondence with the County Council concerning drainage into a filled-in dyke at the bottom of the garden. Time, money and gardening prowess are sadly limited, but a parish strawberry tea in wellies doesn't seem quite the done thing."

The letter was signed "from a drowning rector's wife", the wife being Diana Shelton, who lives at the rectory in Waltham, near Grimsby with her husband Ian and their three young children, Michael, Megan and Matthew.

Their garden showed every sign of enjoying the rich soil that makes this corner of north-east Lincolnshire such a productive area. Huge brambles reared out of the shrub border on the right-hand side of the lawn. Even huger ones were threatening to take over on the left, where three big hebes had been hard hit by the coldest winter seen in these parts for a long time.

The winter and spring had been relatively dry, but I could see by the clumps of rushes that the ground on the left-hand side wanted to be quagmire more than it wanted to be lawn.

Anglian Water had recently been to the rectory to install a new sewer junction behind the garage, but the Sheltons, who had hoped that this might solve the problem of the bog, had been told that it was likely to make things worse. The old, cracked sewer had probably been absorbing some of the surface water and draining it away. The new one wouldn't. The water authority was as puzzled as the Sheltons about where this water was coming from.

The garden, being large and fertile, held great possibilities for keen gardeners and a previous incumbent had left the makings of a good shrub border on the right-hand side. But the Sheltons are not keen on gardening, and parishioners would hardly thank Ian Shelton for spending time hacking his brambles rather than christening babies. In between mothering, Diana Shelton teaches maths, so she does not have much time for the garden. But she hated the feeling of "everything being out of control".

Of the two areas that worried Mrs Shelton, the problems of the left-hand border seemed far more pressing than the back section of the garden. At the back, I suggested she might harden her heart, reach for some brushwood killer (such as SBK) and spray the brambles. They are bullies and need to be treated as such.

With the brambles out of the way, the grass could be allowed to grow long between the fruit trees. The children would perhaps appreciate the wilder aspect of this part of the garden (you can't make a decent den in short grass) and the grass could be cut just twice a year.

In the left-hand border, about 16ft wide, there is little left except rubble from an unidentified building, a laurel and the battered hebes. A small JCB seemed to be the right tool to reach for. It could scoop up the rubble, hook out the useless laurel and the dead hebes, grade and smooth over the ground ready for sowing lawn seed in September and scoop out a trench down the length of the border to take a land drain - if Anglian Water or the diocese decide this is what is needed.

Grassing over means more mowing - the most boring job in a garden - and this is not the way a keen gardener would resolve the problem, but the Sheltons have enough on their plates without another shrub border to look after. If they can't get anybody to agree to lay a land drain (they are tenants, so can't make those decisions), then they could plant a couple of willows. These will soak up a great deal of water and if they keep them pollarded, (which means cutting out some of the main stems at the end of winter each year), they can stop them getting too big for their boots.

I wouldn't choose a weeping willow for this position. Its habit means it couldn't be pollarded and it would quickly get too big. I'd go for types such as Salix alba sericea with striking silvery white leaves. Or Salix alba vitellina `Britzensis', the scarlet willow with leaves that are pale yellowish grey. It is at its best in winter when the new shoots are bright orange-red, glowing in a January fog.

On the right-hand shrub border, brambles are threatening to engulf some good plants. The brambles are intertwined with the shrubs so spraying isn't an option. But they could cut the brambles back to their growing point and paint SBK on to the new shoots when they emerge.

Some of the plants there, the laburnum and the purple-leaved cherry, needed no attention. Others did. The variegated dogwood Cornus alba `Elegantissima' is grown as much for its winter bark as its summer leaves. The bark is brightest if you take out a third of the old stems each year in early spring.

There was another hebe in this border that had been knocked back by winter cold. I would tidy it up by cutting out all the dead growth now and also attack the huge laurel that was overhanging a viburnum. The viburnum was by far the more important of the two shrubs. The best way to cut back a laurel is to run your hand down the branches you want to get rid of, to find the point where they join the trunk, or a bigger branch. Cut them off at the junction.

I got excited about the rejuvenation of the shrub border. Too late, I noticed a sense of overload descending on Mrs Shelton, though she was much too polite to say so. I should have come with my pruning saw, rather than a load of hot air. Perhaps some kind parishioner will oblige.