Garden Care
Year-round maintenance for established gardens across South West London and Surrey. The same two pairs of hands, every visit, for as long as the garden needs them.
There is a difference between a garden being cut and a garden being kept.
Most maintenance is subtraction — everything reduced to a manageable size on a fortnightly rota, whatever the month, whatever the plant. What we do is closer to editing. Knowing which hedge wants cutting in August and which will never forgive you for it. Knowing which shrub is three years from its best and should be left alone, and which one has had its day.
A well-kept garden doesn't look maintained. It looks as though it has simply always been that way. That is the harder thing to achieve, and it is the only thing we're interested in doing.
How we work
None of them are complicated. Almost nobody does all four.
Not a rotating crew who've never seen the garden before. You shouldn't have to explain the same border twice, and we shouldn't have to guess what was here last spring.
Every species has a right week and several wrong ones. We work to the garden's year rather than a fixed rota, which is why what we do in March looks nothing like what we do in September.
Most gardens decline from the ground up long before it shows in the planting. Feeding, mulching and managing the soil is part of the year as standard — not a line item that appears when something starts to fail.
A joint that has opened, an edge that has dropped, a step working loose. We are builders as much as gardeners, so the small faults get fixed while they are still small — before they become a project.
The year
A rough shape of the twelve months. Every garden gets its own version — this is simply how we think about the year.
Winter
December – February
Structural pruning while the bones are visible — fruit trees, wisteria, deciduous hedging. Bare-root planting goes in. Paving, steps and drainage checked and cleared before the frost finds every weak joint.
Spring
March – May
The busiest weeks of the garden's year. Mulching and feeding, the first cuts, roses pruned and tied in, beds edged and reset. Everything staked and supported before it needs to be, rather than after it has flopped.
Summer
June – August
Holding the line. Formal hedging clipped to a crisp edge, containers watered and fed properly, spent flowers taken off to keep the display running. Lawns raised through dry spells, never scalped.
Autumn
September – November
Cutting back with judgement — seedheads and grasses left standing where they earn their keep through winter. Bulbs in. Leaves off lawns, out of gullies and away from drains. The garden put to bed properly.
Two ways in
Aftercare
Every garden we design and build leaves with a care plan written specifically for it. We know what's planted and why, what sits beneath the paving, and what the whole thing will want in year three when it starts to close over.
Nobody is better placed to keep it. It's the same team that built it.
Garden Care
We also take on a small number of gardens we didn't build. Usually ones that were well made and have been let slip, or well kept for years by someone who has now retired.
We'll walk it with you first and tell you honestly what it needs — including if the honest answer is less than you expected.
Getting started
i
We come and spend an hour in the garden with you. No charge and no pitch — mostly we want to see the soil, the boundaries and what's already been planted.
ii
You get a plan for the twelve months ahead: when we come, what happens on each visit, and what it costs. One figure, agreed in advance. No hourly rates and no surprises in July.
iii
Same faces, a settled day in the month, and a short note after each visit telling you what was done and what's coming next. You don't have to think about it again.
We keep the number of gardens deliberately small. It's the only way the second visit is as good as the first.
Enquire about care
A sentence or two is plenty — how big it is, roughly when it was last properly looked after, and what's bothering you about it. We'll come back to you personally within two working days.
South West London & Surrey
Richmond · Barnes · Kew · Chiswick · Wimbledon · Putney · Ealing · Esher · Cobham · Weybridge · Oxshott