30k to landscape small London garden is this normal?!

[Jem01]

Interested to find out how much (or little!) people have paid to hire a landscaper to completely redesign garden?

We have a 25 square metre sized garden so fairly small courtyard type garden in SE London.

We got a quote through from a landscaping company that created an amazing design for us. The work includes raised flower beds, patio, fences, lighting, garden steps, new external garden door to the side passage, moving a wall, fences to the side passage, new gate to the front garden and plants throughout so a lot of work for a small garden but the results would be amazing.

They quoted £30k inc vat. To say we were shocked was an understatement! Is this standard for a landscape company? Is this too much? We had other quotes from local gardeners but it was more a basic job and we know wouldn't produce the same results.

Ps. We did get a 2nd quote back from this company which was £16k but included no work to the front garden.

Crumbelina, your garden looks fantastic! I would've thought it was a good designer's job ;) In terms of the prices, is everyone aware how big 25sq m is? It's the size of a living room... How can you squeeze 30k worth of stuff in there?

Hard landscaping costs a lot. Materials are expensive, and a really high quality job requires a lot of hours of careful and often back-breaking work, often involving multiple tradespeople.

Plants will be bought from garden centres at premium price because that's the only convenient way to get the 'instant' garden effect. To give you an example, you can buy a small acer from Aldi, Lidl or Morrisons for around £5 and wait 10 years for it to grow, or you can pay something in the region of £300-400 for one that is already the final size.

You guys are really scaring me. With my project, I've put aside a BIG budget for my garden because I want it to look impressive. I'm mostly after a lawn and plants. £10k was very generous, I thought.

Now I'm worried.

I would not worry too much Lawn and plants are much less than Hard landscaping.

Yes, lawn and plants are comparatively cheap. We have ALOT of hard landscaping, materials and building work-7 weeks worth. Our lawn is only £700 so peanuts in the scheme of things and plants £6000. More if we want mature. All our plants are being purchased at trade by our designer so at least 20% cheaper.

Also, lawn and plants are things where you can do a LOT of work yourself, potentially saving £££. It's things like changing levels and hard landscaping that start racking up the dosh. Even then, you can do loads yourself with relatively minimal skills (I am proof of this - I'm dreadful at DIY but landscaped my own garden).

My dh is a hard landscaper, he worked (he's now my carer) for a well known company.

I have just read your post to him and he said depending on where you are and if you have access to the back garden etc - i.e. actually being able to use the entrance to the garden for materials and machinery. It could actually be seen as quite cheap .

We are in the SE and and he has worked on several jobs in London. His company charged £68per man per hour plus VAT (he saw nowhere near that!).

We had a massive restructure of our garden in the South West - it was a complete tip, and it's enormous, so it needed a lot of work to get the levels right. No lighting or fencing required, however, but it still cost about £22.5K. Absolutely worth it,

Oh thank you so much, JoJo! It was tough moving railway sleepers around in the rain in January, but it was worth it. We've now sold that house and have to do it all over again with our new tip of a garden.

We researched and bought all the materials for our project and so we do have a good idea of how much things cost. I can't really see how it can add up to £30k.

I think it's more the case that it's London, property prices are sky high and people will pay those prices. In fact, I'd like to know how much companies were charging for the same work in the late 1990s and early to mid 00s before the property boom.

Surely the cost depends on the materials you've chosen? Cheap stone or expensive stone? (You can pay serious money for the stone) Cheapo fence panels or the expensive ones? And so on.

Of course it does julia - if you want to pave your garden in gold high end stone, it'll cost loads more than the cheap sandstone paving I laid in my garden! Plus, there is a vast deal more labour in, say, a design that requires a lot of curves to be custom-cut in stone versus a square one! Working on different levels (e.g. terracing, creating walls) introduces cost over a flat site etc etc etc

Are you terraced? If they need a crane to deliver stuff that will push the price up.

If you live in a city like the OP, there's often additional costs in getting plants and materials in and out of a garden. She mentions a side passage which suggests to me that site access might be a problem and that materials might have to be moved by wheelbarrow.

Holy shit! These prices! I'd no idea. No wonder we keep putting off having ours done. Looks like it'll have to wait a lot a bit longer.

Just to reassure people - you can do things MUCH cheaper than this if you're willing to put in some work yourself!

Heffalump I don't actually have any photos! I'll try to remember to take some over the weekend - or steal DH's.

£68 per man hour plus VAT is an awful lot bumbum.

Jem - I would get another quote. It is too much.

Crumbelina your garden is gorgeous, you must be so proud of the work you did!

Oh, thanks so much Flown . That's lovely of you to say. Yes, we were very proud of it (just a shame we've now sold that house).

(Whispers: we found garden renovation quite easy in comparison to house renovation as it doesn't have to be super precise). We'll do it all again with our new garden once we've completed the interior in about 5+ years.

bibbitybobbityyhat Especially as the people doing the work are only paid slightly more than minimum wage . They did operate a bonus scheme though. They do charge less per hour for the planting and maintenance teams.

As somebody also mentioned it will cost more if they have to hire cranes. It's also more expensive if they do not have direct access to the garden and all materials are taken through the house. There are so many variables.

Sounds about right for quotes. Absolutely outrageous though! We had 3 very similar quotes for a SE London courtyard garden of about 30 sq m.

I thought 'fuck that!', drew up my own design (took a little while to calculate steps and you need to be careful with 'raised platforms' including decking and raised patios so you don't fall foul of planning regs). Then I got an outdoor handyman/fencing/builder and his sidekick to build it for me, sourced the plants myself (look up Provender Nurseries in Swanley, excellent quality even without a trade discount, better pricing than garden centres - but if you can find a builder/landscaper with a trade account there, so much the better ). In all, it cost about £3k, though we already had sufficient external lighting for the space so that wasn't included, and I did all the sourcing eg breeze blocks, cement, flooring, soil, plants... Also all of the planting. It looked pretty good at the end - for the space/size. A lot of people thought we'd used the same garden designer a neighbour had paid £45k for, though the designs were nothing like (completely different shape/aspect garden) - I think people just assume that a 'specialist' of some kind is needed, when actually in such a tiny space you're pretty limited anyway and you're not going to see a return on such a high investment unless you're in prime London.

If you want to pm me, feel free - happy to send a before/after pic of what's possible on a DIY budget so that you can decide for yourself whether £26k extra on professionals is worth it, you may well think it is!

JoJoSM2 yes provided a thorough breakdown in costs we still thought it was too expensive

wobblywonderwoman we think so too and agree we may go back to them and suggest exactly that

AstrantiaMajor your garden looks fantastic you must be so pleased with it? The size reminds me of ours :-) thanks for the tip about Marshalls catalogue - if you could pm me your landscapers that would be great. Really interesting to read your costs and also heffalumpshavewrinkles and TheReturnoftheSmartArse
too. It makes me think that as crazy as it sounds, perhaps the original quote sounds about right for a garden in London...
TheReturnoftheSmartArse could you pm the details too?

Crumbelina you've done an incredible job! I only wish I had the creative mind time and effort to do something similar

ITGurl we aren't looking for a garden with minimal maintenance between us my husband has the green fingers so he'll be doing the weeding and maintaining of it!

Bumbumtaloo v interesting reading your response! We have side access for workmen to transport stuff through, I remember them mentioning how useful this would be..

Haven't got a chance to respond to all but thanks to everyone for your responses, lots of food for thought. We have a one more landscaper to see for a quote this weekend. Will update..

Done

I think the point is you are paying the landscaper for the time for all the things Jeffery has outlined.
I've spent probably hundreds of hours on redesigning and sourcing materials our garden the last few years (which I have loved doing) and that's without any practical work, so I can see where the costs are in essentially paying someone else to do it. I estimate I've spent about 10k on plants, seeds and materials and some handyman time for construction as well for a garden of about 40 sq meters. It's a complex site (hill and a couple of big trees) and still a work in progress as the plants are mostly still very small and I have only cheap concrete slabs as hard paving as I used what was there. So you can do things much cheaper if you can make the time.

Paying to get your garden done is like building a house. You can get as basic as ou want, but the better the architect the higher the cost.
I've seen a small garden costing 200K, incredibly expensive, but it was like looking at a work of art, it was breath taking.