Gardener hourly rate

[FictionalCharacter]

I've had a lot of injuries and illness recently and can't see myself catching up with the gardening. I'm thinking of hiring a gardener for a few hours to do some serious weeding - brambles, nettles, grasses, tree shoots.
What's the usual hourly rate these days? How do I get a recommendation? People often ask on Nextdoor but I'm sure a lot of the recommendations are just for someone's brother or friend.

You need to say where you live, really.

Oxfordshire

Going rate in South Oxfordshire seems to be £25 per hr, going by what friends and family have said.

£25/hr

London it's £35/hour. She's very fast though wastes no time I'm always amazed what she can get done! Takes all the waste away with her too.

I'm in Oxford city centre and have a young man who helps with the garden for £15 p/h. You don't need someone with any expertise for basic stuff like weeding/tidying, just someone helpful and willing. So, someone's friend would be fine (if helpful and willing).

For comparison, my cleaning lady is £16.50 p/h, and my skilled handyman £25 p/h. I wouldn't pay £25 p/h for something as basic as weeding.

Thanks all!
Absolutely @RogueFemale I don't need someone with great expertise to do weeding, it's just grunt work. But I do need someone more clued up than the useless "gardener" my mum hired - he couldn't be trusted with more than grass cutting! And having a DH who has never learned to distinguish weeds from my lovingly nurtured plants has made me wary.
I don't know anyone who has a friend who could do it either. I just have no idea how to find someone.

@FictionalCharacter I agree it does need to be someone intelligent. My garden helper is a 20+ chorister who happens to like working outdoors and needs extra cash. Previously tried teenage sons of neighbours, - useless and really unreliable. So all I can say is to avoid the teenagers.

If you want someone qualified then look on the Gardeners Guild website. Good gardeners will charge at least £20ph. Many these days won’t do a couple of hours here and there but instead will want you to have them for a whole day and offer a day rate - likely to be around £200. This is what my DH does.

More than half of his clients call him because the unqualified gardener they have been using has ruined something or just buggered off. In the trade we call these ‘Mow and Blow’ people!

P’S we are in the East of England and even my mum’s unqualified but very good gardener charges £20ph. He only does lawns and hedges. He’s a handyman really but he’s excellent.

That depends on how much you value your plants. I would want someone with good id of all the common weeds at an early stage of growth, not someone who pulls up everything they don’t recognise, and who doesn’t recognise much.

Absolutely @RogueFemale I don't need someone with great expertise to do weeding, it's just grunt work. And that’s why gardeners are so undervalued.

I’m in south east, close to London, usually about 15 an hour for this type of work . Most people can recognise brambles, nettles, tree shoots and weeds, particularly if your garden is mature.i think some respondents have gone a bit ott in their responses and are coming across as almost irate.

I disagree that weeding is grunt work. You need to be able to identify a weed, and that’s not that easy. Also, what is a weed? One man’s plant is another man’s weed.

Basic labouring garden work around £20, more skilled from £25 to £30.

£15 per hour is tight. I'm North Yorks and the going rate is @20-25, and some people charge more.

£22.50 down on the South Coast.

IMO, the issue with weeding isn't just that some people don't know a weed from a plant - it's that someone who's not particularly got that skillset will be slow and inefficient. If I watch someone who is a non-gardener weeding, they will often break roots - because they've not the foggiest how different weeds grow - meaning the job needs doing again straight away. Or they'll miss lots of weeds because they can't recognise the cotyledons, or they just don't notice the weed as fast as someone who's got their eye in.

I would be interested in the crossover between people who think anyone can recognise a weed, and people who post on here in response to the 'what plant is this' threads and can't answer correctly.

£30-40/hour is the going rate for an experienced gardener in the Home Counties/South Oxfordshire.

Gardeners get very little work over winter which is why their hourly rate is more.

Clearance work can be done cheaper but it’s not gardening.

Absolutely @RogueFemale I don't need someone with great expertise to do weeding, it's just grunt work.

Wow - what a horrible attitude. Let's just break this down for the grunt work as you call it.

Someone to come out to your house, likely own tools, bend and lift, weed whilst doing a proper job and having the ability to deciperbetween weed and your beloved plants, clean up, and go to next job. There own car, fuel etc… but you've labelled this ‘grunt work’. You seriously need to reframe your thoughts on the value of this role. Anyway if it's just grunt work, you bloody do it! Or is it simply beneath you? How much do you think it should be?

Apologies for the ramble, this is the short version 😂I hate to be the bearer of more bad news than you already know @FictionalCharacter but finding the right kind of gardener is increasingly difficult and frustrating to pin someone down with a commitment, so I'd be very clear with whoever you ask to quote, on exactly what you're expecting them to do.

Be prepared for lots of false starts, people letting you down, etc. my advice is to do your garden project in two stages. Garden clearance first, then regular gardening help, you may not get one person to do it all.

Realistically there tend to be 3 categories of gardening companies/individual

1 - 2 days Blitz = circa £200 - £300 but it depends on the size and state of your garden.

Regular skilled gardener once a week visit = £60 to £80 per visit, grass and weeding plus general jobs. Warning: these people are highly in demand, tend to stick to landscaping jobs, rarely want to do all the hard graft every week.

Regular semi-skilled or jobbing gardeners = £49 - £50 per visit - in the majority, nowadays they just want to push a mower up and down, and onwards to next customer, as they can cover more people than focusing on fewer customers with all the whistles and bells. They don't know one end of pruning sheers from the other, but they get the absolute basics done.

Now a bit more detail....
One-off garden clearance, grounds work type companies. They are good at doing one-off jobs, come in with the right tools and make short work of it. After that, they aren't interested in ongoing maintenance. You may have to part with circa £200-£300 (caveat: highly dependent on the size and the state of your garden) - benefit is they will blitz your garden back to being a blank canvas, very quickly, so you have time in this growing season to enjoy the tidiness and do some planting. Downside is that you need to keep it tidy from then on by identifying a different person for regular maintenance.

Fully qualified horticultural trained, are experts and know a lot about plants, will charge a premium, and don't want to be tied to a weekly customer regime or do the grunt work.

Jobbing gardeners I've approached in the past say "sorry I don't do weeding" and they are often unreliable, don't show up so you text them and they say "the van's got a puncture/sorry not feeling well, can't be arsed see you next week". Cheers.

I now have a lovely chap, really reliable and helps with most general gardening work, and I "keep him close with hoops of steel" (to paraphrase Shakespeare) because he's a very very rare person. I value him highly so he gets cups of tea and biscuits during his 3-4 hours a week! He costs me £50 for 3 hrs (Glos area) and worth every penny.

Word of mouth can be a good way to find out. One chap we had wanted some work immediately post-retirement and after 4 years, went into full retirement. He was wonderful, used to do all our fencing and pressure washed our patio. We were very spoilt!

Check the local news agents for small ads

put a card in the local newsagents "Gardener wanted for [hrs per week / hourly rate approx]

That's no good though if you want someone to keep on top of a garden. That needs to be regular, weekly or fortnightly for 2/3 hours. Not a one off. And very few people could afford to pay £200 a week/fortnight for a gardener!

You are probably finding it hard to get decent work because you pay so little, though.

I'm sure it varies by area, but I have lots of colleagues who are incredibly knowledgeable, with years of expertise and/or formal training, and none of them would have any issue with doing the weeding or other 'grunt work'. Most people consider a weekly commitment an obvious positive - never come across anyone who wouldn't want it!

So, I suspect if you're finding people don't want to commit to working at yours regularly, the issue is that you are charging too little.

I did not use the term "grunt work" (that was in a reply to me).

I said I "have a young man who helps with the garden for £15 p/h. You don't need someone with any expertise for basic stuff like weeding/tidying, just someone helpful and willing."

He's a neighbour, 5m walk away, uses my tools, enjoys working in fresh air as a change from his regular work (which is v.highly skilled but poorly paid), and is happy for the extra cash.

I can't do the work myself as I have a bad back.