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Garden Design In Hemel Hempstead

Restoring a walled garden, or starting from a blank lawn?

Garden design for both Hemels - Old Town and Boxmoor plots with history to work with, New Town plots with everything still to create.

Hemel Hempstead has more garden design pedigree than any town on this list - the New Town's water gardens were drawn by Geoffrey Jellicoe, the most celebrated landscape architect England produced last century. The private gardens deserve the same seriousness. We work across both Hemels: long walled plots behind the Old Town's Georgian frontages, and Boxmoor's Victorian gardens by the canal, designed properly from survey to planting.

Call 01727 326358 Book A Design Visit
Walled kitchen garden with flower and vegetable beds, a wheelbarrow and wisteria on the far wall

Arrange A Garden Visit In Hemel Hempstead

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.

Local Knowledge

Designing Gardens In Hemel Hempstead

The two halves of Hemel could not be more different to design for. Behind the Old Town High Street run long, narrow, walled gardens that have been cultivated continuously since the Georgians - sheltered, full of inherited fruit trees and odd level changes, with soil improved by two centuries of use. Boxmoor's Victorian streets sit between the canal and the Trust's moors, with the water meadows doing the borrowed-landscape work. The New Town neighbourhoods bring the opposite brief: blank-canvas plots from the 1950s and 60s, often never seriously planted, where the whole structure of a garden has to be created rather than restored.

Jellicoe's water gardens are more than local trivia - they set a standard. When the man who wrote the century's defining books on landscape design laid out your town centre around a serpentine canal of the Gade, 'good enough' is a low bar to bring to the gardens a mile away. The practical local knowledge still decides the details: chalk is shallow under the valley neighbourhoods, so the moisture-hungry borders that thrive on the clay caps at Leverstock Green need rethinking in Boxmoor, and anything near Trust land needs its boundary treatment agreed before a post goes in.

Every Garden Starts On Paper
Design First Every Garden Starts On Paper
Initial Garden Consultations
Free Initial Garden Consultations
Design Through To Planting
One Studio Design Through To Planting
Itemised Costs Before Work
Written Itemised Costs Before Work

Services

What We Design And Build In Hemel Hempstead

Each of these runs as a full service in Hemel Hempstead - and most gardens end up drawing on more than one of them, under a single masterplan.

Why It Matters Here

What Shapes Hemel Hempstead Gardens

The houses and their plots
Two towns share the name: the Georgian Old Town and Victorian Boxmoor with walled and established plots, and the post-war New Town neighbourhoods with their distinctive open-plan frontages and practical family gardens.
The ground underneath
Hemel sits where the Gade and Bulbourne valleys meet the Chiltern dip slope - chalk close under the valley neighbourhoods, clay-with-flints on the higher shoulders toward Leverstock Green and Highfield.
Heritage and trees
The Old Town along the High Street is a conservation area of Georgian and earlier buildings, and Boxmoor's greens and moorland are owned and managed by the Box Moor Trust, whose consent matters as much as the council's if your boundary meets Trust land.
Mown grass path curving between full herbaceous borders with hollyhocks and crocosmia

Reassurance

What Standing Behind A Garden Means

The construction underneath it all
Terraces, walls and steps fail from below, not above - a thin sub-base, no drainage behind a retaining wall, mortar where there should be movement. We build those hidden layers as if they were the visible ones, because in three winters' time they might as well be.
Plants replaced if establishment fails
Planting is living stock and a small percentage of losses in year one is horticultural reality. Where a plant we supplied and planted fails despite reasonable care, we replace it - and the aftercare visits exist partly to catch problems while they are still small.
Built to the drawings, checked against them
The detailed design is not a sales document, it is the build contract. Setting-out, levels and materials are checked against the drawings as the work proceeds, and you can hold the finished garden up to the plan line by line.
Still answering the phone afterwards
A garden is not finished at handover - it establishes over seasons. When a question comes up in year two, you will reach the people who designed and built it, not a voicemail that never calls back.
Deep shrub and perennial border running along an old brick garden wall

Our Process

How A Hemel Hempstead Garden Project Runs

Seven stages, in the same order every time. The gardens that disappoint are almost always the ones that jumped from a quick quote straight to the diggers, with no drawings for anyone to build to.

  1. Garden consultation and site survey

    We walk the garden with you and listen more than we talk. Then the measuring starts: levels, orientation, drainage behaviour, existing trees worth keeping, and test pits to find out what soil you genuinely have rather than what the area is assumed to have.

  2. Concept design

    A scaled masterplan showing the whole garden - spaces, routes, levels, structures and planting zones - with mood imagery for materials and atmosphere. This is where you react, argue and change things. Far cheaper to move a terrace on paper than in stone.

  3. Detailed design and planting plan

    The agreed concept is developed into construction drawings and a species-by-species planting plan: setting-out dimensions, wall and step details, levels, lighting positions, and every plant named with its quantity and pot size.

  4. Itemised written costs

    Because the design is fully drawn, the build can be priced properly - each element itemised, so if the figure needs trimming you choose what changes rather than watching quality quietly disappear from everything.

  5. Landscaping and construction

    Groundworks, drainage, terracing, walls, steps and structures, built off the drawings by our own landscaping team. Setting-out is checked against the plan, and sub-bases and falls are treated as the point of the job, not the boring bit before the paving.

  6. Soil preparation and planting

    Beds are decompacted and improved before a single plant goes in - on this area's clay-with-flints and chalk that preparation decides whether a border establishes or sulks. Then the planting plan is set out on the ground, adjusted by eye, and planted.

  7. Handover and first-season aftercare

    We walk the finished garden with you, hand over the plans, plant list and care calendar, and come back during the first season - because a designed garden is at its most vulnerable in its first year, not its first week.

The Area

Things To Do In Hemel Hempstead

Working somewhere teaches you what is actually worth a visit. In Hemel Hempstead, start with these.

Boxmoor

Four hundred acres of Trust-owned moors, meadows and grazing herds threading through the town along the canal - Hemel's countryside, inside the town.

Learn more about Boxmoor

Where Hemel Hempstead Is

Feedback

What Clients Say

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.”

Caroline W.

St Albans · Full garden redesign, sloping plot

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.”

Daniel R.

Radlett · Garden redesign after house rebuild

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.”

Priti & James K.

Harpenden · Planting design and borders

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.”

Sophie T.

Berkhamsted · Outdoor kitchen and pergola

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.”

Michael B.

Chorleywood · Design and build, rear garden

Budget

Garden Design Costs In Hemel Hempstead

£25,000 – £90,000

Old Town projects in Hemel price around access and heritage - walled gardens reached through passageways, wall repairs folded into the landscaping, and conservation-area tree notices - while New Town plots spend the same money on creating structure from scratch: boundaries, levels and semi-mature planting.

Working range for a complete design-and-build garden, materials and VAT included. Planting-only commissions start well below it. Your figure comes from a drawn design, itemised in writing.

See the full cost guide

Questions

Hemel Hempstead Garden Questions

Do I need planning permission for garden work in Hemel Hempstead?
Usually not - most garden landscaping is permitted development. The exceptions are specific and worth knowing: a raised deck or platform more than 30cm off the ground needs permission, walls and fences are limited to one metre beside a highway and two metres elsewhere, and paving a front garden with more than five square metres of impermeable surface requires either permeable construction or an application. Trees carry their own rules here: The Old Town along the High Street is a conservation area of Georgian and earlier buildings, and Boxmoor's greens and moorland are owned and managed by the Box Moor Trust, whose consent matters as much as the council's if your boundary meets Trust land. Your planning authority is Dacorum Borough Council, and we check constraints on your specific address as part of the survey.
What is the soil like in Hemel Hempstead gardens?
Hemel sits where the Gade and Bulbourne valleys meet the Chiltern dip slope - chalk close under the valley neighbourhoods, clay-with-flints on the higher shoulders toward Leverstock Green and Highfield. We dig test pits during the survey rather than working from the postcode, because the ground can change within a single plot - and the planting plan is written to what we find, which is most of what separates borders that establish from borders that limp.
We are in a New Town part of Hemel with an open-plan front garden. What can we change?
The open-plan frontages are part of the New Town's original design code, and in some streets covenants or planning conditions still restrict walls and fences forward of the house - worth checking with Dacorum before committing to a front boundary. In practice we design front gardens for these plots that create presence without enclosure: structured low planting, specimen trees, quality surfacing within the permeable-paving rules. Rear gardens carry no such restrictions, and that is where the New Town plots shine - many are a genuinely good size, unshaded, and completely open to being designed from zero.
What does a designed garden cost in Hemel Hempstead?
Old Town projects in Hemel price around access and heritage - walled gardens reached through passageways, wall repairs folded into the landscaping, and conservation-area tree notices - while New Town plots spend the same money on creating structure from scratch: boundaries, levels and semi-mature planting. As a working range, complete design-and-build projects across our area generally run from £25,000 to £90,000 depending on size and scope, with planting-only commissions from around £4,000. The cost page sets out what moves the figure and where the money actually goes.
Is Hemel Hempstead inside your normal working area?
Yes - Hemel Hempstead is one of the towns we planned this studio around, not an edge case. There is no travel supplement and no minimum spend tied to distance; what shapes the price is the garden itself, its access and its ground, never the drive to reach it.

Coverage

Areas We Cover

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.

Or jump straight to a service

Ready When The Garden Is

One visit to Hemel Hempstead, no fee, and you will know what the garden could become. The rest is up to you.

Call 01727 326358 Book A Design Visit