Five stages
What happens, in what order, and what it costs.
Every stage produces something you keep and can act on, including if you stop there. Nobody is asked to commit to the whole thing on the strength of a first conversation.
At a glance
- First visit
- no charge
- Survey to concept
- 3 weeks
- Concept to full plan
- 4 weeks
- Design fee
- from £2,400
- Build
- by contractor
- Best time to start
- autumn
The stages
- i
no charge
First visit
An hour and a half in the garden with a notebook. What you use it for, what you hate about it, where the sun is at six in the evening, where the washing goes. I leave with photographs and you leave with an honest view of whether you need a designer at all — perhaps a third of these conversations end with me suggesting you do not.
- ii
£480–£720
Survey
Measured survey of the plot, levels taken where the fall matters, soil sampled in three places and tested for pH and texture, existing trees recorded with their root protection areas. Drawn up as an accurate base plan, which is yours whatever happens next.
- iii
£950–£1,400
Concept
Two layouts, drawn by hand, with a written note on what each one is trying to do and roughly what it would cost to build. We sit down over them for two hours and one of them usually turns into the answer within twenty minutes; the second hour is spent arguing productively about the rest.
- iv
from £1,450
Full drawings
Setting-out plan, levels and drainage, construction details for anything unusual, a materials schedule, and the planting plan with quantities and spacings. Enough for two contractors to price the same job and for you to compare the numbers honestly.
- v
£340 a visit
Through the build
Visits at setting out, after hard landscaping, and on the planting days — I set the plants out on the ground myself before anything goes in, because a plan is a diagram and a garden is not. Then a written maintenance year for whoever looks after it.
Fees are for a typical suburban plot of 100 to 400 square metres. Larger gardens and anything with levels, trees or a listed wall are quoted individually after the first visit, never before it.
Budgets, plainly
What a garden costs to build
As a rule of thumb, construction runs between £180 and £400 per square metre depending on how much of it is paved, walled or dug out. Planting, by contrast, is rarely more than a tenth of a project — which is the wrong way round, and part of why we design the planting first.
Where money disappears
Changes of level, drainage, machine access, and any wall over 600 mm high. If a design needs all four, it will cost more than twice the same design on a flat plot with a side gate, and you should know that at the concept stage rather than the tender.
Phasing
Perfectly sensible: build the structure this year and plant next autumn, or do the near half now and the far half in three years. What is not sensible is planting before the hard landscaping, however tempting the nursery is in April.
Who holds the contract
You do, directly with the contractor. I will help you compare quotes and I will say plainly which one I would take, but I do not take a commission from either of them, and you never pay me for somebody else's labour.
When to start
Ring in late summer. Survey and design over autumn and winter, build in late winter when contractors have space and the ground is not baked, plant in March or in October. A garden designed in April is usually a garden planted in June, which means a summer of watering and a worse establishment than it deserved.
The studio takes nine to eleven gardens a year and is usually booked two to three months ahead. Planting plans for people who already have a layout they like are quicker — four weeks from survey, and they can be done by post if you can send accurate measurements and honest photographs.