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Our Garden Design Process In St Albans

Wondering what commissioning a garden actually involves?

Seven stages from the first walk round the lawn to the first summer after handover - with every reversible decision made before any irreversible one.

Gardens fail in a predictable order: quote first, dig second, think during. The entire logic of our process is to run that backwards. The thinking is finished, argued over and drawn before the first tonne of soil moves - which is why the build stage of a designed garden is usually the calm part.

Garden designer sketching a masterplan at a desk beside planting reference photographs

Start With The Free Visit

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.

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

Our Process

The Seven Stages

The order never changes, because each stage locks in what the next one depends on. What changes garden to garden is how long each stage deserves.

  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.

Timing

Honest Durations, Stage By Stage

The part people underestimate is rarely the build - it is the lead times on materials and semi-mature plants, and the value of not rushing their own decisions.

Typical garden project durations by stage
Stage Typical duration What can extend it
Consultation and survey One visit, then a morning of measuring Very large or heavily treed plots
Concept masterplan 2 - 3 weeks How much the brief evolves once you see options
Your decisions on the concept As long as you need Nothing wrong with a fortnight of thinking
Detailed drawings and planting plan 2 - 3 weeks Structural elements needing engineering input
Pricing and materials lead time 2 - 4 weeks Specified stone, bespoke joinery, semi-mature trees
Landscaping and construction 4 - 8 weeks on site Weather at the groundworks stage, restricted access
Planting 2 - 5 days Timed to season - occasionally held for autumn or spring
Handover and aftercare First full growing season Nothing - the season takes the time it takes

End to end, three to five months from first call to planted garden is normal. Projects that start their design in autumn or winter catch the best planting windows and their first full summer.

While We Are There

A Building Site You Can Live Next To

Protection before machinery
Drives are boarded, lawns that are staying get trackway, and if materials come through the house the route is sheeted and hard-protected before day one - not after the first scrape.
A site that closes down properly
Tools away, excavations guarded, and the working area left safe and orderly every evening. If you have children or a dog, tell us and the fencing plan will assume both.
The garden's assets treated as assets
Trees that are staying get their root zones fenced off; topsoil is stripped and stockpiled separately from subsoil rather than mixed into uselessness. Protecting what you already own is free quality.
Photographs of everything that gets buried
Sub-bases, drainage runs, cable ducts and wall foundations are photographed before covering. It is your evidence of what you paid for, and our reference for ever after.
One person who owns your answers
Questions go to the person running your project, and news - good or awkward - reaches you the day it happens. Nobody enjoys surprises less than the people paying for the garden.
Stone manor garden landscaped into terraces with steps, clipped hedges and layered planting

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

Questions

Process Questions

What does the design fee cover, and what does it cost?
The fee covers the measured survey with soil pits, the concept masterplan, the revision rounds that get it right, and the detailed construction and planting drawings the garden is built from. It is quoted in writing before you commit, scaled to the size and complexity of the garden rather than a percentage plucked from the air - and if we build the garden, part of it is absorbed into the build contract. The drawings are yours either way.
Can we change our minds during the design stage?
That is what the design stage is for. The concept round exists precisely so you can move the terrace, question the pergola and veto the pond while changes cost nothing but drawing time. What we ask is that the arguing happens on paper - the revision rounds are built into the fee, whereas redesigning in brick is built into nobody's budget.
Do you build every garden you design?
Most, and it is how we prefer to work - the same studio carrying the design through the build is where the quality holds. But the drawings are produced to a standard another good contractor could price and build from, and occasionally that is what a client wants. We would rather design you a garden someone else builds well than water down the design to win the build.
What is the garden like to live next to during a build?
Organised, is the short answer. Deliveries are scheduled rather than constant, the site is tidied and made safe every evening, protection goes down on drives and through any house access before the first barrow rolls, and you will always know what next week looks like. Landscaping is muddier than loft conversions but shorter than most of them - and it happens outside your windows, not inside your rooms.
Which decisions are hardest to reverse later?
Levels first - where the ground finishes against the house, where terraces sit, how water sheds - because everything else stands on them. Then hard structure: walls, steps, and anything with foundations. Planting, lighting positions on spare capacity, and furniture are all revisable. This is exactly why our sequence spends so long on the survey and concept: the irreversible decisions get the most paper time.
What do we receive when the garden is handed over?
A walk-through of the whole garden with the people who built it, the full drawing set as built, the plant schedule with botanical names and positions, a month-by-month care calendar, certificates for any notifiable electrical work, and the dates of your first-season aftercare visits. In other words: everything a future you, or a future gardener, needs to run the garden without ringing us - plus our number for when you would rather ring us.

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

The First Hour Is Free

The first visit costs nothing and commits you to nothing. We look at the space, ask what is not working, and tell you plainly what it could become and roughly what that costs - before any design fee enters the conversation.

Call 01727 326358 Book A Design Visit