Moving advice is mostly written for indoor people. Boxes, furniture, the kitchen, the closets. Almost nobody talks about the part of the house that lives outside. Which is fine until you’re standing in your back garden three weeks before a move, looking at a Japanese maple you planted six years ago, wondering if it comes with you or stays.
For people who garden seriously, this question matters. The kitchen will rebuild itself in a week. A garden is years of soil work, slow root growth, and perennials that took two seasons to settle in. You can’t pack that the way you pack a sofa. So the planning has to start earlier and look different.
A move with a garden has three layers running at once. There’s the regular indoor move. There’s the question of what to do with your plants. And there’s a smaller logistical layer that gets ignored until move day: everything outdoors that isn’t a plant. Garden furniture, tools, pots, the shed, the trampoline, and the half-empty bag of potting compost in the corner. A lot of people only think about that third layer once the truck arrives. The smarter route is asking your moving crew about outdoor items at the quote stage. Edmonton-area movers like Last Stop Moving will build outdoor handling into the plan if you tell them about it up front. The mistake is leaving it as a verbal “oh and there’s also the patio stuff” on the day.
What Plants Come With You
Not all plants travel. The general rule is the younger and smaller, the better the odds. The Royal Horticultural Society’s guidance on moving trees and shrubs is honest about this: plants that have been growing in one spot for more than five years are much less likely to survive transplanting than younger specimens. That means the rose you put in last spring? It can probably make the trip. The mature magnolia? Probably not.
Containers are the easy case. Anything in a pot just travels. Wrap the pot in an old towel, water lightly the day before, and load it last so it comes off first. Herbs, smaller perennials in pots, or anything you’ve been growing on a balcony or patio. Those make the move with no real drama.
In-ground plants are the harder call. Timing matters. Deciduous trees and shrubs prefer to move during their dormant period, which is roughly late autumn through early spring. Evergreens are pickier and like that narrow shoulder season at either end. Trying to move a tree in mid-July is a near-guaranteed waste of effort.
For perennials and clump-forming plants, division is your friend. You can split a hosta or a daylily clump in half, take a part with you, and leave the rest. Same with strawberries, ornamental grasses, and most herbs. The new garden gets started faster, and you don’t lose the original.
The Outdoor Stuff Nobody Plans For
This is where moves get long. Garden furniture, sheds, pots, tools, a BBQ, garden lighting, and the bird feeder pole driven 18 inches into the ground. Each of these is a separate small puzzle. Most are awkward to wrap, awkward to lift, and awkward to stack.
A few rules from people who do this often. Empty everything that holds soil before move day, because dirt-filled pots are heavier than they look and stain whatever is next to them in the truck. Disassemble what comes apart. Most outdoor furniture has bolts that came in a bag from the manufacturer, and putting it back together at the new place is much faster than trying to wedge an assembled patio set into a corner of the truck.
Garden tools deserve their own conversation. Long-handled tools (rake, shovel, hoe, and edger) are bundled together with a strap and travel as one unit. Power tools like mowers and trimmers should be drained of fuel a day or two before the move because most movers will not transport equipment with fuel in it, and you don’t want to find this out at 8am on moving day.
What to Leave Behind, Honestly
A move is the right time to look at the garden critically. Some things are not worth taking. Old plastic pots that have gone brittle in the sun. Rusted hand tools. The chiminea that cracked three winters ago. The half-bag of bone meal that’s been open for two years.
The same is true for plants you’ve been quietly resenting. The shrub that keeps getting blackspot. The hosta is in the wrong spot. The tomato cage that bent. New garden, fresh edit. You don’t have to take everything that grew in the old one.
This is also the moment to talk to whoever is buying or moving into your old place. Sometimes the next owner wants the herb spiral, or the trellis you built, or the raised beds. Sometimes they want it all gone. Knowing that ahead of time changes what you pack.
Setting Up at the New Place
The first instinct on arrival is to plant everything immediately. Resist it. Most plants travel better than they unpack. The few hours in transit are fine, but a stressed root system needs a soft landing.
Find a shaded spot for transplanted plants and group them there for the first 24 hours. Water lightly. Then plant in priority order: anything with exposed roots first, then container plants whose roots are circling badly, then everything else over the next week or two.
Do a soil test before any major in-ground planting at the new house. Different yards have wildly different soil profiles, and the plants that thrived at your old place may struggle in soil with different pH or drainage. A basic soil test kit costs under $20 at any garden center and saves you guessing for a season.
Hiring Movers Who Can Handle Outdoor Items
Most household movers are happy to move boxes and furniture. Outdoor stuff is where service quality starts to differ. Some crews handle it as a normal part of the job. Others charge extra, treat it as an afterthought, or refuse certain pieces outright.
Ask in advance, in writing. The Better Business Bureau’s guide to hiring a mover has the standard credentials checklist (proof of insurance, verified company truck, no rental vehicles, written contracts, and no large up-front deposits), and that all applies here too. But add specific questions about outdoor handling. Will they move potted plants? Garden furniture? A disassembled shed? A fire pit? Power tools with fuel? The answers vary more than you’d expect, and the differences matter for what you can plan to bring.
Avoid surprises. Quotes that look unusually low almost always have a long list of “additional fees” hiding underneath. Quotes that come from an in-person walkthrough (or at minimum, a video walkthrough that shows the back garden too) tend to be more accurate than ones built from a phone call.
The Longer Game
A garden is a slower kind of project than a move. The move is one bad week away. The garden takes the next three or four years to feel right.
Which is fine. The point of bringing plants and outdoor pieces with you isn’t to recreate the old garden in the new one. It’s to bring some continuity along. A few things that grew in the place you used to live are now growing where you live next. That’s the part of moving that quiet gardeners care about and the part nobody writes a checklist for.