Design
Every garden starts on paper — pencil, and watercolour where it helps you picture it. You see the garden before it exists, and you can change your mind while changing it is still free.
Design projects
Rayleigh
After moving into their marital home, Ben & Tamil had a great garden space made unusable — the previous owners had eradicated all the grass to work around her pets. The ground was levelled for a new lawn, railway sleepers were repurposed into a pathway, raised beds relocated, and new borders created for planting.
Brentwood
A new extension needed an exterior to complement it. A new lawn, a fragrant lavender border, espaliered trees, and a stumpary with tall grasses — allowing them to stay close to, and introduce, new wildlife.
London
Redesigning the unloved external space of an ex-local-authority block of flats. Communal ground given the same attention as a private garden, worked up as a full drawn perspective first.
Why it's drawn first
Moving a border on paper costs nothing. Moving it once it's planted costs a day and a skip. That's the whole argument for designing before building — and it's why the drawing comes first every time.
What the garden already has that's worth keeping, what the ground is like, and what you actually want to do out there.
Pencil, and colour where it helps. Planting drawn as it will look, not as symbols on a plan you can't read.
The same person who drew it does the work, or oversees the landscapers who do the hard elements.
Describe it on the phone. If it's a design job he'll say so, and if it just needs a good clear-up he'll say that too.