Does anyone know anything about gardening?

Your wall on the left hand side will advantage you from solar gain across your neighbours garden.
Ths will give anything planted in that bed a boost, as the bricks will accumulate heat during the day and release it into the evenings, effectively giving you a longer growing season.
I would suggest a couple of espaliered fruit trees, apples and pears are the classics, and you can train your own saplings rather than paying topdollar for ready to plant espaliers.
I'm also a great fan of thornless blackberries that could grow along and through some simple home made trellis on top of the wall.

Rear corner seating zone crying out for shade giving jasmine on simple pergola, for enticing evening scent, along with passion fruit for engrossing flowers.

Widen beds, grow salad vegetables.

@Kurai @hugo7 Both good shouts - thanks for the ideas!

Had a drain guy round and he reckons that the tree on the right has roots going into the drain, so some of those slabs might have to come up anyway.

All built. Gonna be a good year I think

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Look good!

Nice. That looks quite robust.

Are you planting directly into the ground?

Looks great. Rhino?

nice, that looks legit. Our freebie one that we fucked up putting together and now has parallelogram windows is looking mighty shifty after a couple of years haha

Spent yesterday morning shifting a shit ton of gravel from the area where we chopped down the sycamores. The gravel on the rest of the garden isn't that deep but here it was nearly 2ft at times. Going to put in a wildflower meadow, will do the next stage at the weekend because I ache all over now.

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Historic flooding in garden? That's a lot of gravel.

Previous owner was an absent landlord who just covered the whole thing in gravel.

Love it.

Uff that is hard work, soil and gravel!

I had a sycamore stump, it was cut down but it had re-sprouted from the side.

Only way to really get rid if to get the stump ground down or dig it all out, had a gardener grind it into wood shavings.

And now the branches I cut off and the trunk are sprouting! It refuses to die, which I can respect but I have no room for it.

I'm currently battling an army of never ending sycamore seedlings

Isn't there some hack where you drill some holes and turn it into a fire?

https://www.wikihow.com/Burn-Tree-Stumps

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Mine was still very alive but maybe? Didn't think of trying, city garden, wooden fence...

It was also near a boundary fence so fire not really an option unless I wanted stump and fence both gone 😁

Sycamores aren't even native. Rocked up with the romans.

Or drill holes and insert eco-plugs. Which are essentially glyphosate suppositories. That's what the arborist who cut down some sycamores at mine did.

https://www.green-tech.co.uk/weed-killer-and-pesticides/total-weed-control/ecoplug-max-tree-stump-killer

Glyphosate and a wildflower meadow maybe not the happiest bedfellows, should totally kill the tree though. Also burning out a wet stump will probably prove harder work than the above illustration suggests.

Stump grinder is the pricey option but will get them out.

Neat SBK does the job perfectly well and is available over the counter, simply drill large holes 3" deep and pour in.

The plugs are intended to not impact anything other than the tree, according to the tree surgeon. And to his word, the grass around mine is fine.

And @ColinTheBald, true, but it weren't me doing it so didn't have to worry about procurement.

I still have an unopened bottle of glyphosate in the shed that I panic bought when I first discovered JKW at the old flat. Never used it and got the proper folks in instead. Who sprayed glyphosate, which suitably knocked back the JKW, along with a 1' perimeter of grass. Scary how effective it was.

The tree surgeons used SBK on my trunks without asking me, thankfully I caught them doing it as I was due to plant a replacement tree soon after so had to wait. Although one of the trunks is sprouting again so didn't completely work.

What have they ever done for us?

One of these: https://www.greenhousepeople.co.uk/greenhouse/17948/hercules-gloucester-5x8-mill-ultimate-package/
Except it was something like £850 in a sale

That's the plan, although no doubt some stuff might end up in pots. No idea what the best thing to do is, tbh.