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