How the landscape design process works and what to expect.
If this is your first time working with a landscape designer, you don’t need to arrive with a full plan and a moodboard. But if you have one, great! What helps is something most people already have without realising it: a clear sense of what you like, and just as usefully, what you don’t.
That’s usually the real starting point. Unless it’s a new home, you know what’s working and what’s not in your outdoors. You’ve lived in the space; you know the parts that annoy you and the parts you’d protect at all costs; you’ve got opinions on colour and material from seeing hundreds of gardens in your life. If it’s a new home, you will have imagined the way you want to live in that new space. What sits between your instinct and a finished garden is technical knowledge, drainage, structure, how materials age, what a site will and won’t allow, and that’s the part we bring.
It’s also not just about the site. We want to know how you actually live, because a garden that suits a couple who host thirty people twice a summer looks different to one built for someone who wants a quiet corner, a dog, and a book in the afternoon. They’re different needs, and the answer changes depending on which one we’re meeting.
So we read two things early on: the site, and you – in the best possible way. On the site, that means where water goes when it rains hard, what’s shaded and when, what’s already growing that’s worth keeping, what the fall across the section actually does versus what the drawings assume. For you, it means understanding how the space needs to work day to day, socially or solitarily, loudly or quietly. Things you love about the garden or gardens in general and things you want to avoid.
Our process runs in five stages once that groundwork’s done.
- A pre-project meet-up, no obligation, just working out if we’re the right fit. We know how important it is to work with people you like and trust.
- Confirming the project once we agree we are. A little legal and scope sign-off
- Vision, where we visit the site again, capture more technical information and talk through what you want, need and wish for.
- Plan, where scope, price, concept drawings and finished drawings all get worked through.
- Implementation, where we project manage our part of it, start to finish.
And, of course, we can help maintain the garden to ensure it’s always in fine fettle, if you wish.
So, all you really need to start is to get in touch, and we can have that first conversation.