YOUR GARDEN
DESIGN BRIEF
Consultation is by way of a questionnaire and a longer site meeting to determine what you want to achieve in your garden. Are you looking for somewhere to relax in the sun, for a seating area, to overhaul the planting or create a vegetable garden or are you completely at a loss as to where to start? We can help interpret your needs and find solutions that take into account the people living with you as well as keeping in mind the location, aspect, geology, topography and plants and wildlife around your garden.
SITE ANALYSIS AND SITE SURVEY
Once the fee proposal has been accepted, a site analysis includes testing the soil, photographing the site, noting water table and drainage, views, neighbours, boundaries and potential planning requirements.
A full site survey, known as a topographical survey, will be carried out by a professional surveyor. This is an additional expense and is not included in our quote. It is essential for developing an accurate design.
PRESENTATION PLAN
Following detailed consultation, survey, site analysis and research, an outline plan or concept plan of the garden is developed. If your garden is very large this might be called a Masterplan as you may wish to develop the garden in phases. We consult along the way in developing the concept plan and ultimately we provide you with both a 2D plan that shows the layout of the garden, along with a 3D digital visualisation which can give you a better idea of what your garden might look like. We also sometimes do hand drawn sketches to help you interpret our ideas.
CONSTRUCTION AND PLANTING
We work with various independent contractors who are experts in hard and soft landscaping and will take good care to make the process as tidy and painless as possible for you. We can’t promise no mud – creating a garden can be a messy process, but we always ask our contractors to think about how they work and how that affects our clients. We like a tidy site. We also like to reduce the cost by reducing the amount of waste that they take off site and we always specify to try to reduce waste where possible. If you would like us to oversee the build, we can quote to monitor the build process. We like to set out the plants where possible and the soft landscapers then expertly plant them. We sometimes bring in lighting contractors to give you ambient (and low voltage) lighting and we usually irrigate only trees and can instruct irrigation specialists to carry out this work, working in conjunction with the contractors.
MAINTENANCE
It is so important to know how to look after your beautiful new garden and our maintenance schedule is illustrated with all the plants with tips on what to do when. We also provide details for maintenance of other elements of your garden that we have designed such as ponds, pergolas and paving. We offer a maintenance service which includes three visits a year where we will tidy, weed and tweak.
INITIAL CONSULTATION
We will be happy to initially discuss on the phone and then visit your garden for a brief meeting in order to put together a quote. We do not charge for this visit unless a lot of travel is involved.
Images © Marianne Majerus Garden Images and Little Olives Photography