Garden Drainage - My garden is like a resevoir

[adamm7C]

Hi, I'm new to this site and hope you can help.

From my house I walk down two steps onto a patio which is about 2 / 2.5 metres wide and then 5 steps up to my grass (about 1 metre ). I have one retaining wall at the front and one at the back.

The garden is about 180 sq m. The soil is quite mixed. At the front I have top soil and a sandy ballast and clay. In the middle and back I have about 2-3 inches of top soil and then clay. At the retaining wall at the back, there is a concrete bed which comes out 1.5 metres from the wall, where water runs back to the wall and there is 3 inches of top soil above the concrete.

The garden is very wet and muddy and so are the walls. It just hold water. like a reservoir. I have damp going up the wall at the back and damp coming down the wall at the front.

I have had lots of suggestions such as land drains - but then someone said it wont really work in so much clay; a soak away - but then I was told the water would just build up. I am considering artificial grass but don't know whether I will just have water coming back up.

Do you have any suggestions?

 

[JohnD]

dig a hole at least two feet deep. See where the water level is.

 

[adamm7C]

Thanks.

I did that but didn't hit water. It was clay. Would that suggest that the problem is more about the mix of the top soil and not the drainage? Someone suggested root zone and turf instead of top soil?

 

[adamm7C]

I hope these images help. You can see the front wall and the back wall. There is no drainage in the patio either.

 

[adamm7C]

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[JohnD]

if you dug a 2 foot hole and it did not fill with water, you can drain your garden into that hole. The deeper it is the better. Subsoil is often a bit porous where old roots went into it and rotted away.

If it works, you can make it bigger and turn it into a soakaway so you don't fall into it.

 

[adamm7C]

Ok, that's very interesting. I could easily go down 3 or 4 ft or more as you might have seen from the pictures.

Now what I need is a contractor who can do this and re-do the lawn? I live in Hertfordshire, near Watford. Root zone was suggested as an idea instead of top soil to help with the drainage as well. What do you think?