I love before and after photos.
This is the only before photo I could find of the same patch but this was it when the nettles and brambles were NOT six foot high. I guess I didn’t take any photos of that as I was too depressed to look out the window when it was like that.
Before: old rusty chainlink fence on left hand side, old wooden fence and gate at bottom, 100s of well established nettles, brambles, docks, dandelions, overgrown slabbed path, overgrown gravel patch
After: new fence on left hand side, bamboo screen hiding old fence and gate at bottom, nettles, brambles, docks, dandelions dug up by the roots and removed, slabbed path power washed clean and clear, concrete base rediscovered at bottom of garden, gravel patch renovated.
There is a path that runs all the way down the left hand side to the bottom of the garden which I didn’t even know went that far down since it was under a few inches of dirt and weeds.
And then to top it off, there’s a concrete block that runs across the bottom of the garden from left to right, that was under about 6-8 inches of dirt and weeds. I think it’s a base for an old shed or greenhouse or something from years ago, but I dug up all the weeds and nettles and now I have a nice bit of hard landscaping. It’s cracked and broken for sure, and that’s probably why someone decided to cover it over, but I kinda like it. It’s a bit like crazy paving and it’s a bit of history in a way.
In the photo on the left you can just see the start of what was a very overgrown square of gravel (where the brown bin is) and that is what I cleared and turned into that nice formal gravel area (where the black bag and circle in the middle) in the photo on the right.
This was the worst bit of the garden for sure, about 16 metres long and covered in weeds that had an unbelievable root network underneath.
Because I dug out those sections in the corners and middle of the gravel for beds, I have excess gravel which you can see piled up on the right, so hopefully I can use that in another part of the garden this year 
