Gardener in Skelmersdale

Skelmersdale is built on Carboniferous rock: Coal Measures mudstone, siltstone and sandstone under most of the town, Millstone Grit under Digmoor, and over all of it a deep, continuous blanket of Devensian glacial till. British Geological Survey mapping returns the same soil parent material at every point sampled across the town, a deep till of loam to clayey loam with low and variable carbonate. Six kilometres west, Ormskirk sits on Sherwood Sandstone with a sand-to-loam parent material. Skelmersdale is the one town in this corner of West Lancashire that is not on the sand, and it holds water where the plain lets it go.

The town was designated on 9 October 1961, the first of the Mark Two new towns and the first in the North West, and the corporation that built it was wound up in March 1985. What it left is a housing stock of one era: Radburn layouts on the older estates, where the house fronts a shared green and the parking court sits behind it, and boundary planting of much the same age running across whole neighbourhoods. The ground under it rises about seventy metres, from the Tawd valley floor at Birch Green to the Ashurst side in the east, with the river running through the middle and culverted in places.

• Everything here starts with the till. A deep clay loam holds water through the winter, stays cold late into spring and pans under foot and machine, so structure rather than feeding is what limits a lawn. Aeration, scarification and top dressing do more on this ground than another bag of fertiliser. New turf wants a bed that has been properly relieved rather than raked, or it roots into the seam and lifts, and a planting hole wants its sides broken out, because a generous hole backfilled with compost in clay loam fills up and stays full.
• On the Development Corporation estates the private garden and the vehicle access are usually on opposite sides of the house, and the front lawn often runs into council-maintained amenity land with no fence marking where one stops. We work out that line before quoting and price only the private side, since the amenity grass and the corridors are maintained by West Lancashire Borough Council or by the landlord. It also means arisings from a clearance or a hedge cut are carried further here than on a conventional street, and that belongs in the quote rather than in a surprise.
• Seventy metres of height inside one town means Skelmersdale does not come into the season all at once. A sheltered garden on the Tawd valley floor at Birch Green and an exposed one up at Ashurst or Digmoor are not at the same point in spring, and the gap shows again in the last cut of the year and in when hedge work is best done. We time the round by where in the town a garden sits, not by the town name on the job sheet.

Skelmersdale is about six kilometres east of the yard on Green Lane in Ormskirk, close enough that the town has its own place in the working week rather than needing a journey made for it. On the older estates we ask at booking which side of the house the garden is reached from, because the parking and the garden are often not on the same side. We work across Ormskirk, Up Holland and Maghull too — send a postcode and we will tell you either way.