Au Jardin Garden Maintenance is a gardening company that has been run by Anne Fache for 10 years. She offers services in regular maintenance like weeding and pruning, landscaping, and designing your dream garden.  

I sit on patio steps, exhausted after shoveling soil and planting what felt like 500 bulbs. Anne sits beside me, seemingly unaffected. The descending winter sun gleams weakly over the two planters we just filled, grey tiles now bursting with fresh soil and verdant plants. 

I ask Anne why she decided to start Au Jardin and she laughs, replying that she “didn’t want to work for anybody anymore”. More seriously she adds that she “wanted something a bit more flexible” to look after her children.  

Her favorite jobs to do are when, “you can see an immediate change- either after designing something like this [the planters] or even if it’s just clearing gardens, I like it when you arrive and it’s not great and then when you leave, it looks much nicer.” 

I ask her how the pandemic affected her company, and she responds, “At first I could not go and see clients, but a lot of gardens have access on the side gate. Also, a lot of my clientele are elderly, so I didn’t really want to endanger them.” 

When asked how her company has changed since she first started, she replies, “Not much but I’m much busier. Initially I started to work around the kids, so I only did a few [jobs] until I started doing more and more. The gardens have changed as well because I probably worked on smaller gardens and now, I’m getting acres.” 

I ask what her hopes for Au Jardin are in the next couple of years. She replies, “I would like to do more wildlife types of things rather than tedious things like weeding, maybe work with my clients more to do more creative aspects of my job.”  

We finish the interview and I thank her for her time and for giving me a small insight into what she does daily. 

You can view Anne’s work on her Facebook page: Au Jardin Garden maintenance. She can be contacted via telephone and email for any inquiries. 

Tel: 07742445824 

Email: Anne_Fache@hotmail.com