The average homeowner probably has a rough idea of how much a new bathroom or kitchen might set them back. Yet for many, the cost of landscaping a garden often comes as a bit of a shock – especially as it can be hard to find a point of reference unless you know someone who’s done it. And while there are definitely ways to design your garden on a budget, the reality is that garden transformations require machinery, labour and materials – which all add up.
Fortunately, in preparation for my new project, I’d watched the entire back catalogue of Your Garden Made Perfect on BBC. Each episode contains two gardens and talks through the budget for each – one on the lower end and one on the higher end. It didn’t take many episodes for me to realise that I’d be looking at thousands, rather than hundreds, for a garden of my size.
In an attempt to keep the costs down, I decided to do the garden design myself. In an ideal world, we would’ve done the actual landscaping ourselves too, but my partner works away a lot so this wasn’t realistic for us. Design, you can do through research, sketches and online tools. While landscaping, i.e. bringing the design to life, involves a lot of heavy lifting and often requires specialist tools and machinery.
Finding a local landscaper
After getting three quotes from local contractors to help bring my design to life, we decided to go for the contractor who came with the best recommendations (these came from our local Facebook group). The quote we settled for also happened to be the cheapest.
A word of warning: if the cost sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. Same goes for availability – if a contractor is booked up for a while then that’s normally a good sign, and means they’re worth waiting for.
We got the keys to our home in September (not a great time for gardens) so there was no immediate rush to get the garden sorted. I spent the winter researching, reading, and drawing up designs before reaching out to contractors in February. The contractor we went with was booked up until July (!) which turned out to be a blessing in disguise as it allowed us to save up a bit more.
In total, we ended up spending just over £7k on the hard landscaping, aka laying the patio, flower beds and borders, laying out a small lawn and large gravel area and filling the borders with decent soil:
| Materials, machinery and labour | £5,986 |
| Patio paving stones | £1,153 |
| £7,139 |
|---|
It took a team of four people just over a week to finish the job. You’ll notice that plants are missing from the cost breakdown. This is because we bought and planted everything ourselves to keep the contractor’s quote down. Spoiler – greenery is expensive!
By the time the work was completed in late July (almost a year after moving in!) we’d missed the summer growing season so we decided to leave our borders and flower beds completely empty until the following spring. This really helped us spread the costs and meant we didn’t have to compromise too much on what we wanted, we just had to wait for a little longer to get it.
