How Scottish Weather Affects Garden Design Choices
Almost every garden that fails here fails for the same reason. It was designed for somewhere else.The photographs people save are overwhelmingly from drier, brighter, warmer places. Pale limestone terraces. Loose gravel courtyards. Silver leaved drought planting. Smooth timber decking. All of it beautiful, all of it photographed in July, and a good deal of it entirely wrong for a garden in Glasgow. Scottish weather is not a detail to design around at the end. It is the thing that decides which designs are available to you. Get that right and your garden looks good in February, which is when you will mostly be looking at it. Get it wrong and you have a slippy, boggy, green tinged space you avoid for eight months a year. We build gardens across Glasgow and the Central Belt and have done for 19 years. Here is what the weather actually changes. The five weather factors that matter Factor What it does What it changes in your design Rainfall Roughly 170 wet days a year in the west Drainage, falls, surface choice Clay soil Holds water, dries hard, moves seasonally Lawns, planting, foundations Low light and damp Encourages algae and moss Slip resistance, material finish Wind Stronger than people expect, especially exposed plots Fencing, structures, plant choice Short season and frost Late springs, early frosts, freeze thaw cycles Material ratings, planting, timing Everything below comes out of those five. Rainfall changes everything about water The west of Scotland is one of the wetter parts of the UK. Glasgow sees rain on roughly half the days of the year, and much of it arrives as prolonged drizzle rather than short heavy bursts. That matters, because ground rarely gets a chance to dry out fully. What this means in practice Every surface needs a fall. A patio laid dead level will hold water. Falls are usually expressed as a ratio like 1:80, meaning the surface drops one unit over eighty. It must run away from the house, never toward it. Every surface needs somewhere for that water to go. A fall that runs into a boggy lawn has just moved the problem three metres. Water needs a destination: a channel drain, a gully, a soakaway, or free draining ground. Drainage comes before style, not after. If you have standing water after rain, that gets solved first. A beautiful patio over an undrained site is a beautiful patio that sits in a puddle. Materials that struggle in constant wet Materials that cope Clay soil changes what will grow and what will hold Much of the Central Belt sits on heavy clay. Clay holds water in winter, bakes hard in dry spells, and moves as it wets and dries. The lawn problem A lawn on undrained clay is the most common disappointment in Scottish gardens. Water sits at the surface, grass roots cannot breathe, moss takes over, and by February you have a green carpet that is mostly not grass. You can have a good lawn on clay. It needs: If none of that appeals, artificial grass on a properly built permeable base is a legitimate answer, particularly for dogs and young children. It needs a real sub base, not just sand over the clay, or it holds water. The planting problem Plants that want free draining soil will sulk and eventually die in clay. Mediterranean planting, lavender, most silver leaved species, many alpines. They are all over the inspiration photos and most of them are a slow waste of money here. What works on Central Belt clay: Raised beds are the single most useful planting solution on clay. You control the soil, drainage improves automatically, and the beds double as structure and seating. The foundation problem Clay swells and shrinks with moisture. Footings for walls need to go deeper than people expect, and retaining walls need drainage behind them because saturated clay is heavy and it pushes. Damp and low light mean green, slippy surfaces Long periods of damp, low winter sun and shade from buildings and fences create ideal conditions for algae and moss. In shaded north facing spots, surfaces can go green within a single season. This is a safety issue, not just an appearance one. Surface Slip risk when wet Goes green? Textured external porcelain Low Slowly, washes off Natural sandstone Low to medium Moderately Monoblock Low Moderately, in shade Concrete slabs Medium Quickly Grooved composite decking Low to medium Slowly Smooth timber decking High Quickly Polished or smooth stone High Moderately On any route you will use in winter, the back door path especially, choose the grippiest surface you can afford. A slippy path in January is a genuine hazard. Two practical points: Aspect matters more here than further south Because the sun sits lower in the sky at this latitude, shade cast by houses and fences is longer, and north facing gardens get considerably less direct light than an equivalent garden in southern England. What to do about it Find the sun before you place anything. Go out mid morning, midday and early evening on a clear day and note where light actually lands. Most people put seating where there is space rather than where the sun is at six in the evening, and then never use it. Use lighter materials in shaded gardens. Pale paving bounces what light there is. Dark surfaces in a north facing garden read as gloomy. Accept the shaded strip for what it is. A lawn will never thrive along a shaded fence line. Shade tolerant planting, a gravel or paved utility strip, or storage will serve you better than fighting it. Invest in lighting. Because the evenings are long and dark for much of the year, garden lighting extends usable time more than almost any other spend. Run ducting during the build even if you fit lights later, because retrofitting means lifting surfaces. Wind shapes structures and planting Wind is underestimated, particularly on exposed and elevated plots, near the coast, and in open Central Belt
Hiring a Landscaper: Questions, Deposits and Red Flags
Three complaints come up again and again when someone calls us about a garden that went wrong.Somebody took a large deposit and disappeared. Somebody laid a patio on next to nothing and it sank within two winters. Somebody quoted one figure and invoiced a much bigger one.All three are avoidable, and all three are avoided at the same moment: before you pay anything. The questions below are the ones that surface a problem while it is still cheap to walk away. We build gardens across Glasgow and the Central Belt and have done for 19 years. What follows is what we would want a member of our own family to ask, including the question almost nobody asks us and absolutely should. The question nobody asks, and everybody should People ask about price constantly. They almost never ask about the structure of the payments, and that structure is where the real risk sits. A landscaper who takes 60% upfront has your money and no strong reason to come back quickly. A landscaper on sensible staged payments has to keep working to get paid. That is the whole mechanism protecting you, and it is decided in a two minute conversation before you sign. What is normal Payment Typical amount When Deposit 10 to 30% of total On booking, to secure materials and the slot Stage payment 1 25 to 30% Excavation, drainage and sub base complete Stage payment 2 25 to 30% Hard landscaping substantially complete Final balance 15 to 25% On completion, after you have walked the job On a small job of one or two weeks, a deposit and a final payment is perfectly normal. Stage payments matter more as the job gets longer. What is not normal Where possible, pay the deposit by card or bank transfer rather than cash. Card payments over £100 carry additional protection under Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act, and either method leaves a record. The 20 questions, grouped by what they protect you from Credibility and legitimacy 1. What is your full business name and registered address? If it is a limited company, check it on Companies House. It takes two minutes and tells you how long they have traded and whether the company is in good standing. 2. How long have you been trading, and under this name? A business trading under three different names in five years is worth asking about. 3. Can I see your public liability insurance certificate? Ask to see it, not just be told it exists. Check the policy is current and the cover amount is sensible, usually £1 million or more. This is what covers damage to your property or a neighbour’s. 4. Are you registered with any trade body or checked trader scheme? Not mandatory in landscaping, and plenty of excellent firms are not. But a listing that can be looked up adds a layer of accountability. 5. Who will actually be on site, and will you be one of them? Some firms quote with the owner and build with subcontractors nobody has met. Not automatically a problem, but you should know before the van arrives. Preventing the disappearing act 6. What is your current workload, and is this job starting and finishing continuously? The most common cause of an abandoned job is a landscaper juggling three sites at once, chasing deposits to fund the last one. Ask directly whether they will be on your garden every working day until it is done. 7. What are your start and finish dates, and what happens if you overrun? Get both in writing. Weather will move them, and that is fair. A firm that will not commit to any dates at all is a different matter. 8. Can I visit a job you are working on right now? This is the most revealing question on the list. A live site shows you tidiness, whether the team is actually there, and how they treat the neighbours. Nobody can stage that. 9. Can I see a job you finished three or more years ago? Anything looks good the week it is laid. Three winters in Scotland is the real test. If every reference is from the last six months, ask why. 10. Can I speak to two recent customers? Then actually phone them. Ask the one question that matters: did they turn up every day, and did the final invoice match the quote? Preventing the sunken patio This is the part of the job you can never inspect once it is finished, which is exactly why it gets cut. 11. What sub base material and depth are you using, and why that depth? The answer you want is specific. Something like MOT Type 1, 100mm to 150mm for a patio, 150mm to 250mm for a driveway, compacted in layers with a plate compactor. A vague answer to this question is the single biggest warning sign in the whole process. Roughly 40% of a garden budget goes into things you will never see, and this is most of it. 12. Where does the water go? Every surface needs a fall built into it and somewhere for that water to end up. In Glasgow, with roughly 170 wet days a year and a lot of clay underneath, this is not optional. Ask about falls, and ask whether a soakaway or land drain is needed on your ground. 13. Is the paving going on a full mortar bed or spot bedded? Full bed is correct. Spot bedding, mortar blobs under each corner, is faster and cheaper, and it leaves voids that fill with water. Slabs rock, crack and lift. If a quote specifies dabs, ask for it to be changed. 14. Will there be a geotextile membrane between the soil and the stone? Cheap, and it stops the sub base sinking into soft or clay ground. 15. How will the edges be held? Haunching or a proper edge restraint. Without it, paving spreads sideways and joints open up. 16. Is
Planning a Garden Project: The Complete 10 Step Guide
Most garden projects do not go wrong on site. They go wrong three months earlier, when nobody decided what the garden was for, the budget was a guess, and the whole thing got booked for April because that felt like the right time. A garden project that is planned properly is mostly boring by the time the digger arrives. Decisions are made, materials are ordered, everyone knows what is happening. The interesting problems were solved on paper when solving them was free. This guide walks through the ten stages of planning a garden project, what to do at each one, how long things realistically take, and where homeowners most often lose money. We build gardens across Glasgow and the Central Belt and have done for 19 years, so the timings and the warnings here come from jobs, not from theory. The short version Stage What happens Typical time 1. Decide what it is for Agree how you will use the space A week of thinking 2. Survey your own garden Levels, drainage, light, access A few evenings 3. Set a real budget Including a contingency A day 4. Gather ideas, then filter them Against your site, not just your taste One to two weeks 5. Get quotes Three, itemised, same spec Two to four weeks 6. Check permissions Council, boundaries, trees One to two weeks 7. Choose materials Samples, seen wet One week 8. Book and prepare Dates, access, neighbours Varies by season 9. The build Hard landscaping then soft One to eight weeks 10. Handover and aftercare Snagging, watering, maintenance Ongoing Total planning time before work starts: six to twelve weeks is normal. Rushing this is the most reliable way to overspend. Stage 1: Decide what the garden is actually for Before any photos, any materials, any prices. Answer one question honestly: what will you do out here most weeks? Pick two or three from this list, not all of them: Gardens that try to do six things do none of them well. A garden with a seating area, a play space, a veg patch, a lawn, a storage zone and a water feature in 60 square metres feels cluttered no matter how good the workmanship is. Write your two or three down and keep them somewhere. Every decision later gets measured against them. Stage 2: Survey your own garden before anyone else does You will get better quotes and better advice if you arrive knowing your own site. Spend three or four evenings on this. What to check Measure it properly. Length, width, and the awkward corners. Sketch it roughly with the measurements on. Watch where the sun lands. Go out mid morning, midday and early evening on a clear day. Mark the sunny spots on your sketch. Most people put seating where there is space, not where the sun is at six in the evening, and then never sit there. Watch it in the rain. Where does water sit? How long does it take to clear? This single observation changes more about a design than anything else. Much of the Central Belt is clay, and clay holds water. Check the fall. Stand at the top looking down, then the bottom looking up. A noticeable slope is the biggest single driver of cost, bigger than size or materials. Check the access. How wide is the side gate? Can a mini digger get in? If everything has to come through the house, the labour cost rises sharply because barrowing takes days. Find the services. Manholes, inspection covers, where the drains run, any gas or electric routes you know about. Note the boundaries. Which fences are yours, what condition they are in, and whether neighbouring ground sits higher or lower. Access is the most underestimated factor in any garden quote. Machine access through a wide gate versus hand barrowing the same job can differ by thousands of pounds on identical designs. Stage 3: Set a budget that survives contact with reality Two rules. Rule one: add a contingency of 10 to 15%. Ground conditions are unknowable until you dig. Old concrete, buried rubble, a drain that is not where anyone expected. A contingency turns those from a crisis into an inconvenience. Rule two: build less, properly, rather than more, thinly. Twenty square metres built correctly beats forty-five built on a base that fails. You can always extend a garden later. You cannot cheaply fix a sunken patio. General guide ranges, Glasgow and Central Belt Project Typical range Small courtyard, complete £4,000 to £10,000 Medium flat garden: patio, lawn, fencing £8,000 to £18,000 Sloped garden with terracing and retaining £15,000 to £35,000 and up Patio only, porcelain, supplied and laid £120 to £190 per m² Decking, composite £150 to £230 per m² Turfing including ground preparation £20 to £45 per m² Fencing £70 to £140 per linear metre These move with access, ground conditions, spoil removal and material choice. Treat them as a steer and get written quotes for your own garden. Where the money actually goes This surprises people every time. Part of the job Rough share of cost Visible when finished? Excavation and spoil removal 10 to 20% No Drainage 5 to 15% No Sub base and foundations 15 to 25% No Structures, walls, steps 15 to 25% Yes Surfaces, paving or decking 20 to 30% Yes Planting, turf, topsoil 10 to 20% Yes Roughly 40% of a typical garden budget buys things you will never see. On a sloped or waterlogged site it can be more. This is the single most useful thing to understand before you compare quotes, because a suspiciously cheap quote has almost always cut from that hidden 40%. Stage 4: Gather ideas, then filter them against your site Collect what you like. Then do something most people skip: filter it. For each idea you have saved, ask: What survives the filter is your actual brief. Stage 5: Get quotes, properly How many and from whom Three quotes. Any more and you are collecting
Landscaping Terms Explained for Homeowners
You asked for a quote for a patio. What came back mentions MOT Type 1, a 150mm sub base, falls to a channel drain, haunched edges and pointing with a jointing compound. Three quotes, three different sets of words, and no clear way to compare them. That is the problem this guide solves. Below is every term you are likely to see on a landscaping quote or hear on site, explained in plain English, grouped by the part of the job it belongs to. No fluff, and where a term matters to your wallet or your garden lasting, we say so. We build gardens across Glasgow and the Central Belt and have done for 19 years. Everything here is written the way we would explain it standing in your garden. Why the words matter more than you think Most of a landscaping job is buried. Once the garden is finished you cannot see the sub base, the drainage, the mortar bed or the footings. The only place those things exist, before the work starts, is on the quote. That means the terminology on your quote is the only way to compare what you are actually buying. Two quotes for “patio, 40m², porcelain” can differ by thousands of pounds and one of them can be built to fail, and you would never know from the headline. Learn twenty of the terms below and you can read a quote properly. We have marked the ones that matter most with a note on why. Quick reference: the 12 terms that decide your quote If you read nothing else, read this table. Term What it means Why it matters Sub base The compacted stone layer under a surface The main thing cheap quotes cut. Decides if your patio lasts MOT Type 1 The standard crushed stone used for sub bases Named on good quotes. Its absence is a question worth asking Fall A deliberate slope on a surface Without it, water sits. Every surface needs one Full bed Mortar spread across the whole underside of a slab The correct method. The alternative, dabs, causes rocking and cracking Spot bedding / dabs Mortar blobs under each corner A shortcut. Slabs crack and rock within a few years Excavation depth How deep they dig before building up Shallow digs mean thin sub bases Spoil removal Carting away soil and rubble Real cost, often several tonnes. Check it is included Soakaway A buried pit that takes water away Essential on clay. Often missing from cheap quotes Haunching Concrete supporting the edge of a surface Stops edges dropping and spreading Membrane Fabric layer separating stone from soil Cheap to include, stops the sub base sinking into soft ground Provisional sum An estimated allowance, not a fixed price Where quotes grow later. Ask what could change Setting out Marking the design accurately on the ground Bad setting out means nothing lines up Groundworks and preparation terms The first third of any job, and the part that decides whether the rest survives. Aspect Which way your garden faces. A north facing garden gets far less direct sun, which changes planting, material choice and where the seating should go. Backfill Putting soil or stone back into a hole after building something in it, such as behind a retaining wall. Base course The lower layer of a build up, whether that is stone under paving or the first row of blocks in a wall. Compaction Whacking a layer down with a plate compactor or roller so it cannot settle later. Sub bases are compacted in layers, not all at once. If a quote does not mention layers, ask. Cut and fill Digging soil off the high part of a sloping garden and using it to build up the low part, creating a level area. Cheaper than importing material, but only works if the soil is suitable. Excavation Digging out. Every surface needs the ground taken down to a depth that allows for the sub base, bedding and the surface itself. Typical patio excavation is 200mm to 300mm deep. Formation level The level of the ground after digging, before anything is built on it. Everything above is measured from here. Geotextile membrane A permeable fabric laid between soil and the stone sub base. It stops the stone sinking into soft ground and stops mud pushing up. Cheap, and worth having on clay. Ground conditions The state of your soil: clay, sand, made ground, rubble, waterlogged. This is the biggest source of price changes once digging starts. Made ground Ground that is not natural soil, usually builders rubble or fill from a previous development. Common on new builds and it often needs digging deeper. MOT Type 1 Crushed limestone or granite graded to a Department for Transport specification. The standard sub base material. Compacts hard, drains reasonably, and does not move. If a quote does not name the sub base material, ask what it is. Reduced dig / reduced level Digging the ground down to a specified depth across the whole area. Setting out Marking out the design on the ground with lines, pegs and paint before building. Getting a garden square and level from a starting point that is neither is a real skill. Spoil The soil, turf and broken material dug out of the garden. It has to be legally disposed of. Spoil removal / muck away Carting spoil off site, usually by skip or grab lorry. A modest patio can generate several tonnes. Check whether removal is priced in or excluded. Sub base The compacted stone layer that carries the load. Usually 100mm to 150mm for a patio, 150mm to 250mm for a driveway. This is the number one place corners get cut, because nobody can see it afterwards. Sub grade The natural ground underneath the sub base. Topsoil The fertile upper layer that plants grow in. Quality varies enormously. Screened topsoil has stones and debris removed. Subsoil The poorer layer beneath topsoil. Plants struggle in it, so beds need
What Does a Landscape Gardener Actually Do?
A landscape gardener builds outdoor spaces. The work sits closer to construction than to horticulture for most of any given project. Excavation, drainage, levels, retaining structures, foundations, paving, timber, brickwork, electrics for lighting, and then, at the end, the planting and turf that everybody assumes was the whole job. If you have ever wondered why a garden quote came back at several thousand pounds when “it is only a patio”, this article explains where that work goes. We have been building gardens across Glasgow and the Central Belt for 19 years, and the honest answer is that most of the skill and most of the cost sits underneath the bit you can see. The short answer A landscape gardener designs and constructs the physical structure of an outdoor space, then plants it and, in some cases, maintains it afterwards. Day to day, the role covers: Some firms do all of that. Some specialise in the hard construction side. A few do the planting side only. Knowing which you are hiring matters more than most people realise, and we come back to that below. Hard landscaping and soft landscaping The trade splits the work into two halves. Nearly every job involves both, usually in that order. Hard landscaping Soft landscaping What it is The built structure of the garden The living parts Includes Patios, paths, driveways, walls, steps, decking, fencing, drainage, bases Turf, seeding, planting, beds, hedging, topsoil, mulching Skills needed Groundworks, setting out, levels, bricklaying, carpentry Soil science, plant knowledge, seasonal timing Share of a typical build Around 70 to 80% of cost and time Around 20 to 30% When it happens First Last Weather dependent? Some. Most work continues year round Heavily. Timing matters Hard landscaping is where the money goes. It is also where things go wrong if done badly, because a failed patio base or a collapsing retaining wall cannot be fixed without lifting everything above it. Soft landscaping is cheaper, faster, and far more forgiving. A plant in the wrong place can be moved. A wall in the wrong place cannot. Landscape gardener, gardener, landscape designer or landscape architect? These titles get used interchangeably online and they are genuinely different jobs. Hiring the wrong one costs time and money. Role What they do Typically hired for Do they build it? Gardener Mowing, weeding, pruning, hedge cutting, seasonal tidying Ongoing upkeep of an existing garden No Landscape gardener Designs and builds gardens, hard and soft Transforming or rebuilding a garden Yes Landscape designer Produces plans, planting schemes, visuals Larger or complex domestic gardens No, usually appoints a contractor Landscape architect Chartered professional, large scale and public schemes, planning work Developments, public realm, commercial sites No Groundworker Excavation, drainage, concrete, bases Sub structure only, often for builders Partly For a normal domestic garden in Glasgow, the person you want is a landscape gardener. Most established firms, ours included, handle the design conversation, the build and the planting under one roof, which avoids the gap that appears when a designer draws something and a separate contractor has to price it. You would bring in a landscape architect for a housing development or a public park. You would bring in a designer for an unusually large or complicated private garden where drawings and planting schedules justify the extra cost. What a landscape gardener actually does, stage by stage This is what a typical garden build looks like from the inside. Stage 1: Site visit and survey The first visit is not a sales call, or it should not be. It is information gathering. We are looking at: Access is the single most underestimated factor in a garden quote. Machine access through a wide gate versus barrowing everything through a hallway can be a difference of thousands of pounds on the same design, because it changes days on site. Stage 2: Design and planning Depending on the firm and the job, this is anything from a conversation and a sketch to a full scaled plan. The work here is: Good design at this stage is mostly problem solving, not decoration. Moving a seating area three metres because that is where the evening sun lands costs nothing on paper and everything once the paving is down. Stage 3: Clearance and excavation The messy part, and usually the first thing that happens on site. Spoil removal is a real cost that surprises people. A modest patio excavation can generate several tonnes of soil and broken concrete, and it has to go somewhere, legally. Skips, grab lorries and tip charges all add up. Stage 4: Drainage This is the stage that separates a garden that lasts from one that fails in three winters. Work at this stage includes: In Glasgow, where we get somewhere around 170 wet days a year and a lot of clay underneath, drainage is not an add on. A patio laid dead level on clay will hold water. A lawn laid on undrained clay will be moss by February. Stage 5: Sub base and foundations The invisible 40% of the job. A patio is not slabs on soil. A typical build up is: Footings for walls go deeper still. Retaining walls need footings sized for what they are holding and drainage behind them, because wet soil is heavy and it pushes. When people compare two quotes and one is far cheaper, this is almost always where the difference lives. You cannot see a sub base once the garden is finished, which is exactly why it is the first thing cut. Stage 6: Building the structures The visible construction. This is where the trade skills show. Setting out square and level, cutting cleanly around curves and manholes, keeping joints consistent, getting riser heights the same on every step so nobody trips. A qualified electrician handles final connections for anything mains powered. Stage 7: Soft landscaping The part everyone pictures, done last so it does not get wrecked by machinery and barrows. Plant knowledge matters here. Choosing things that will handle
How to Choose the Right Landscaping Style for Your Garden
Most people start in the wrong place. They save fifty photos, fall for one of them, and then try to force that look onto a garden that was never going to hold it. Six months later the gravel has sunk, the lawn is more moss than grass, and the seating area only catches the sun for forty minutes a day. Choosing the right landscaping style is not really a decision about looks. It is a decision about what your garden already is, what it does in heavy rain, how much time you are honestly going to give it, and what you want to do out there on a normal Tuesday. Get those four things straight and the style picks itself. This guide walks through how to work it out, what each of the main garden landscaping styles actually costs to build and maintain, and which ones hold up in Scottish weather. We build gardens across Glasgow and the Central Belt, and a lot of what follows comes from fixing gardens where the style was chosen before the site was understood. Start with how you will use it, not how it looks Before any talk of materials, answer this honestly: what will you do in this garden most weeks? Most gardens need to do two or three of these, not all of them. A garden that tries to do everything ends up doing nothing well, and that is the single most common reason a finished garden feels wrong even when the workmanship is fine. Write your two or three down. Everything below gets easier once you have. Six checks to do before you choose a style Do these in order. Each one rules options in or out, which is far more useful than browsing another hundred photos. 1. Space and shape Measure it. Not roughly, properly. Length, width, and the awkward bits.A garden under about 30 square metres behaves completely differently from one at 100 square metres. Small gardens are seen all at once, from above, usually from a back window. That means the surface is the design. In a larger garden you can hide things, break it into zones, and let planting do the work. Long narrow gardens need to be broken across their width or they read like a corridor. Wide shallow gardens need depth created with levels or planting layers. 2. Slope and levels Stand at the top and look down. Then stand at the bottom and look up.If there is a noticeable fall across the garden, this is the single biggest factor in cost and style, bigger than materials, bigger than size. A sloped garden is either terraced into usable flat areas with retaining walls and steps, or it stays a slope. There is no cheap third option, and levelling always costs more than people expect because of groundworks, retaining, drainage and getting spoil off site. The upside: terraced gardens, done properly, are often the best looking gardens we build. Levels create structure for free. 3. Drainage and water Go out during heavy rain, or the morning after. Where does water sit? How long does it take to go? Much of the Central Belt sits on heavy clay. Clay holds water, which means: If you have standing water, drainage comes before style. A soakaway, a channel drain, or raised beds and levels that move water where you want it. Skip this and it does not matter which style you chose. 4. Light and which way it faces Stand in the garden at mid morning, midday and early evening on a clear day and note where the sun actually lands. A south facing garden in Glasgow will take almost any style. A north facing garden behind a two storey house may only get direct light in a strip along one fence, and only in summer. That rules out sun loving planting, lawns in the shaded section, and it changes where the seating goes. It also means shade tolerant planting and lighter paving to bounce what light there is. Put the seating where the sun is at the time of day you will use it. That is usually early evening, which for a lot of gardens is not where people assume. 5. Time you will realistically give it Be honest rather than optimistic. Time you will give it Realistic choices Almost none Paving, porcelain, artificial grass, evergreen shrubs in beds An hour a month Composite decking, paving with a few structural planters, slow growing shrubs An hour a week Lawn, mixed planting beds, some seasonal work Several hours a week, happily Cottage planting, borders, veg, pots, anything you like Almost everyone overestimates by one row. A cottage garden with deep borders is beautiful and it is a hobby, not a finish. If it is not your hobby, you will resent it by year two. 6. Budget, and what it actually buys Budget decides scope far more than it decides style. A modest budget spent on a smaller, properly built area beats the same money smeared thinly across the whole garden. We would always rather build you 20 square metres correctly than 45 square metres on a base that fails. The main garden landscaping styles, and who each one suits Modern and low maintenance Clean lines, large format paving, generous seating area, planting kept structural and simple. Usually porcelain or large sandstone slabs, composite decking, rendered or sleeper raised beds, and a limited palette of two or three materials. Best for: people who want to use the garden rather than work on it, small to medium gardens, new build plots, anyone who is out at work all week. What holds it up: porcelain in particular handles our weather very well. It does not stain, it does not go green anywhere near as fast as concrete slabs, and it stays grippy when wet if you choose a textured finish. Watch out for: a modern garden lives or dies on the quality of the base and the cutting. Poor joints, uneven