Ask a landscaper what a new garden costs and you will almost always get the same answer: it depends. It is true. It is also the least useful sentence in the trade.
Superior Garden Design St Albans, a garden design and landscaping firm based in St Albans, has decided to answer the question properly. Its website lists what customers actually spend. A properly planned planting scheme through an existing layout starts at around £4,000. Rebuilding the main part of a garden, usually the terrace with its walls, steps and borders, typically runs from £25,000 to £40,000. A whole garden redesigned and rebuilt end to end sits between £40,000 and £65,000, and big sloping plots cost more again. Every figure includes materials, plants, labour and VAT.
For a trade that tends to keep its numbers until someone has been round with a tape measure, that is an unusual thing to put in writing.
“Nobody publishes garden prices, so every first visit starts with the same slightly awkward dance,” says Marc, who runs the firm. “The homeowner doesn’t want to name a budget in case we spend all of it. We don’t want to name a figure in case it frightens them off. So everyone stands on the patio being polite for an hour. I’d much rather people looked at the numbers on the sofa on a Tuesday night and worked out whether we’re the right firm before we’ve even met.”
It is also, Marc admits, a filter, and a commercially sensible one. Surveying a garden, drawing it up and pricing it properly takes real time. Spending that time on a job whose budget was never going to meet the brief helps nobody.
“If someone has £10,000, I’ll tell them straight what that buys when it’s done well. Usually that’s new planting through the layout they’ve already got, or one small terrace relaid and framed with fresh borders. What I won’t do is quote them a cut-price version of a £50,000 garden and leave them wondering why it looks tired in two years.”
The garden nobody planned
A lot of the calls the firm takes come from people who have recently moved out of London. St Albans is about twenty minutes from St Pancras on Thameslink, and its interwar estates, places like Marshalswick and Chiswell Green, come with the kind of garden London terraces rarely offer: forty metres or so of lawn behind a wide 1930s semi.
“People will spend a year and a half on the kitchen and the loft, with drawings for every socket,” Marc says. “Then they look out of the back window at a garden the size of a tennis court and nobody has ever planned it. When they ring us, they nearly all describe it the same way. They say it has potential. What they usually mean is that it’s just a lawn with a shed at the end.”
The firm’s answer is to plan the whole garden before anyone digs, and then build it with its own team. Levels, drainage, the terrace, the paths and the planting are drawn up first, so the customer can move things around while that is still free. The same people who drew it then dig it out, lay it, build it and plant it.
“It is far cheaper to move a patio on paper than once it’s laid,” Marc says. “And because the plan is priced line by line, if the budget needs trimming the customer gets to choose what goes. Lose the pergola, fine. What I don’t want is somebody finding out three winters later that the saving came out of the base under everything.”
Where the money actually goes
The part of the pricing that surprises people most is not the total. It is the breakdown. On a typical whole-garden job, the firm reckons 20 to 30 per cent of the cost goes on digging out, drainage and sub-bases, all of which ends up buried. The paving everyone looks at is often a smaller share than the ground underneath it.
“When a quote comes in a third below everyone else’s, the missing third is nearly always underground,” Marc says. “You’ll never see it, which is exactly why it gets cut. You just find out in February when the lawn’s a pond and the patio has started to tip towards the back door.”
The firm photographs every drainage run, cable duct and sub-base before it gets covered over, so the customer has a record of what they paid for.
In St Albans the ground makes this more than a theoretical risk. Much of the city sits on heavy, flinty clay over chalk, with the chalk breaking through in the Ver valley. The clay holds winter rain and sends it towards the house. The chalk drains so fast that new planting can struggle to get going. The team digs test holes on every survey, because the answer can change from one street to the next.
“Clay-with-flints will grow you roses the size of cabbages and drown anything Mediterranean,” Marc says. “Half a mile away on the chalk it’s the other way round. If you plant for an average patch of soil, you’ve planted for nowhere.”
Some of the hardest jobs are the most ordinary-looking ones. The long, narrow gardens behind the Victorian terraces near the city centre often have no side access at all, so every slab, bag of sand and tonne of spoil goes through the house by hand. That gets planned in before the first delivery, down to which materials come in sizes two people can carry. In conservation areas such as Fishpool Street and St Michael’s, anyone planning work on a garden tree has to give the council six weeks’ notice first, which also needs to be in the schedule.
Why autumn is the time to start
For anyone hoping to use a new garden next summer, Marc’s advice is to get it planned now. A full redesign and rebuild typically takes three to five months from first phone call to finished planting, and the build itself is usually four to eight weeks on site.
“Get it planned in the autumn and we’re building over the winter and planting at the right time of year,” Marc says. “Ring in May and you’re lucky to be sitting out in it by September. The gardens that disappoint people are nearly always the ones that went straight from a quick quote to a digger on the lawn. Nobody planned them, and it shows.”
The first visit is free, and the prices are on the firm’s website for anyone who wants to check the numbers before picking up the phone.
