There are several options you have when contemplating how to go about your new garden.

• You could do it yourself, many people do, quite successfully. However, you may be learning on the job and would you employ an architect to design your house or would you design it yourself? Maybe, maybe not?
• You could employ a landscape gardener to design and build your garden for you. Nothing wrong with this approach and it may work well for you. Consider though that usually landscaper probably doesn’t have much time to spend on designing gardens as they’re probably quite busy building them. Don’t think you will get a landscaper to do your design for free even if they say so, they will probably add their time into the build price.
• If you employ a garden designer you should get the services of someone who has the creative flair and expertise to design your garden and spend many hours ensuring that the design is just right for you and your garden. They should have the time to spend with you listening to your thoughts and ideas and translating them into a good design which you will be confident with before its built. They should be mindful of your budget and aim to get you best value for money, this could save you the cost of design fees in itself. A good designer should have outstanding teams of skilled craftsman using high quality materials ready to build your garden for you. Hampshire Garden Design can deliver this for you.

Good question, unsurprisingly, probably the one we get asked the most. There are two parts to the price you will pay.

The first is a fixed fee payable to Hampshire Garden Design after you have decided to go ahead. What is delivered for this is clearly defined in the written (email) quotation we will send to you after the initial consultation. This will vary depending on the challenges involved and the size of the garden. Challenges can range from complex slopes and levels through to the number of existing features you want to retain in your garden which we will have to ‘design around’. Some designers charge a fixed fee, we charge for the amount of time that we think it will take to produce the best possible design for your garden. So a small courtyard garden will cost very much less to design than a large country garden with lots of features and special requirements.

Once the design is finalised then we will introduce you to one of our partner landscaping teams to provide you with a fixed price quotation to build your garden for you. This way of working is very much like the architect/builder team in a house building project and has always worked very well for our clients and us. As to the price of building your garden this can vary considerably depending on the size of the garden, the scale of changes, and the nature of your requirements. It is almost impossible to give you a guess-estimate before the end of the design stage but we will do our best to stay within your budget or bring the price down by changing materials, phasing the build, or changing the design.

Our designers have professional qualifications in garden design and other aspects of gardening which they can show you.

Unlike many designers our lead designer cut his teeth for 10 years by building gardens as well as designing them. He has an in-depth knowledge of what will and won’t work in a garden and is very conscious of these factors during the design stage. If you are asking for something that wont work, we will tell you.

We do our best to listen to you very carefully and respond to what you want rather than trying to impose our ideas on you.

The way we work with state of the art computer modelling enables us to experiment with many different concepts before we decide on the design that is best for your garden. This also enables us to tweak and tune your garden after we have shown you the design so that we can be sure that you have the design that you want. Traditional designers using paper based techniques cannot do this and you will probably have to accept what you are presented with first time around.

We have many many clients who will serve as references for us should you be uncertain as to whether you should go ahead.

This can vary enormously depending upon how fast the client wants to go and what time of year it is but here is an idea of the average timescales.

• First consultation usually within 1 week after first contact
• Site survey and requirements meeting 1 week later
• The Big Reveal 1 week after the site survey and requirements meeting
• Final plans 1 week later
• Quotation stage 2 weeks later
• Build start is variable depending upon your availability and the backlogs of our busy landscaping teams

This means that the minimum time that is feasible from the first contact to the start of the build is around 6 weeks.

Many factors can come into play here such as how long the client takes to review the design, how available they are for appointments and the backlog of the landscaping teams. We do work all year round and we are obviously less busy during the winter and able to turn things around and get started on the build faster.