Nobody publishes garden prices, which is why every project starts with the same slightly awkward dance. Here is our attempt to skip it. The figures below are the ranges we genuinely work in around St Albans - not loss-leaders, not worst-cases - so you can judge whether we are the right kind of firm before anyone stands in your garden.
A few details about the garden is all we need - we will be in touch to arrange a time to come and see it. No charge for the visit and no hard sell afterwards.
The Bands
All figures are complete - design through planting, materials, VAT, everything.
£25,000 – £40,000
One zone of the garden rebuilt to full standard: typically the main terrace with its walls, steps and lighting, the lawn re-established, and designed planting framing it all. The rest of the garden is tidied and left ready for a later phase. Most level, modest-sized plots start here.
£40,000 – £65,000
The masterplan built end to end: levels resolved, terrace and secondary sitting areas, paths, boundaries addressed, a full lighting scheme, and planting throughout - the band where most complete St Albans and Harpenden gardens land.
£65,000 – £90,000+
Sloping sites needing serious retaining structures, large gardens, outdoor kitchens and pergola rooms, semi-mature trees craned in, and phased builds across seasons. The top of the band is set by ambition rather than by any ceiling of ours.
Planting-only commissions - a designed scheme through an existing layout - run from around £4,000 for a pair of main borders to £20,000 for a whole garden with semi-mature structure.
The Variables
The single biggest variable in this area. A metre and a half of fall handled with proper walls, steps and drainage can add more than every paving upgrade combined - and it is also where the drama lives.
A rear garden reached only through a Victorian hallway is built by hand, in carryable units, at hand-build pace. Side access for a small excavator can take a five-figure sum off the groundworks of the same design.
Clay-with-flints needs drainage designing and digging; chalk needs soil building before planting; builder-compacted plots need remediation before anything. The test pits at survey stage exist to price this honestly.
Pergolas, outdoor kitchens and lighting bring joinery, certified electrics and gas runs with them. Wonderful to live with, and never the cheap line on the schedule.
The same planting plan can be bought young for patience or semi-mature for instant effect - a 4-metre tree costs what a 1-metre tree costs times ten, plus the crane. Neither is wrong; they are different purchases.
Sawn Yorkstone, porcelain, clay pavers and good composite decking span a threefold price range before labour. We specify by name at design stage so this choice is yours, made once, with the numbers visible.
The Anatomy
Rough shares for a representative whole-garden project. The surprise for most people is how much sits below ground level - and how little of a good garden's cost is actually paving.
| Element | Rough share | What you are paying for |
|---|---|---|
| Groundworks, drainage and sub-bases | 20 - 30% | Excavation, muck-away, compacted bases, land drains - the part that decides whether everything above it lasts |
| Walls, steps and hard structure | 15 - 25% | Retaining and freestanding walls, foundations, step construction, copings |
| Surfaces | 15 - 20% | Paving, decking, gravel and edges - the visible layer everyone assumes is most of the bill |
| Structures and services | 0 - 20% | Pergolas, kitchens, water, certified electrics and lighting - the band that varies most by brief |
| Soil, planting and lawn | 15 - 25% | Imported topsoil and improvement, the planting plan executed, turf or seed |
| Design, management and aftercare | 8 - 12% | The drawings, the running of the build, and the first-season visits |
Feedback
Rated 5 out of 5
“We had lived with a sloping, unusable lawn in Batchwood for eleven years and assumed it was just what the garden was. The masterplan split it into three levels with a long bench built into the top retaining wall, and we now eat outside from April to October. The bit that impressed me most was the drainage they insisted on putting behind the walls - invisible, and clearly the reason nothing has moved.”
Rated 5 out of 5
“The house was rebuilt two years ago and the garden never caught up - a builder's lawn and a patio that faced the wrong way. They redesigned the whole plot around the new kitchen's sightlines and put in planting with real maturity. Neighbours assume the garden came with the rebuild, which I think is the point.”
Rated 5 out of 5
“What we wanted was borders like the ones you see at proper gardens, and what we had was clay you could throw pots with. The planting plan came with every species named and a paragraph on why it would cope with our soil. Two summers in, the border is better than the photographs they showed us at concept stage.”
Rated 5 out of 5
“An outdoor kitchen was my husband's idea and I was sceptical it would ever be used. Because the gas, power and lighting all went in before the paving, it looks built-in rather than bolted on, and we cooked outside more or less every weekend last summer. The festoon lighting on the pergola was their suggestion and it makes the whole thing at night.”
Rated 5 out of 5
“A proper process from start to finish. Survey with test pits, a concept we pushed back on twice without any sulking, then a build crew who turned up when they said and swept the drive every evening. The care calendar they left us is pinned inside the shed door and actually gets used.”
Questions
Coverage
We design and build gardens across St Albans and the towns west and north of it, from Radlett up to Welwyn and out through the Chilterns edge to Berkhamsted. Not listed? Ask anyway - we take on projects a little further out where the garden is interesting.
An hour in the garden and you will have an honest bracket for what you want to do - with nothing invoiced and no obligation to go further.
