When I’m putting a quote together I often visit a number of different websites for information, prices, etc. Today is a typical one. The garden I’m quoting has a welded liner for the pool, stainless steel cables over the pergola, a type of brick that we’ve never heard of and various other bits and bobs. I’ve visited perhaps 20 sites for information.

What I do is create a folder in Explorer ‘favorites’ and mark it with the clients name. Then I put all the websites relevent to the job into that folder. That way I have all the salient sites at my finger tips no matter how far into the future it may be before the project starts.

 Our Chipping Campden project is pretty much wrapped up. Alison Heitmann, the designer, has been busy planting the garden over the weekend so I’ll get over and take some photographs in the next few days.

 It also means that all of our attention can go onto the Stratford project which has been designed by Sally Hopkinson. This is a reasonably straight forward build comprising York stone paving around a swimming pool (the paving that arrived yesterday) and a large area of Breedon gravel with York sett edges. There’s also a flight of steps and some other details to attend to.

 The site threw a new challenge at us in the guise of removal of a large iron balcony and staircases. At first glance you’d think this would be very interesting for a salvage yard and I was hopeful that we could get it removed for nothing. Not so. Not one of the local guys we approached was prepared to touch it so in the end we had to pay to have it removed. Once it was down a friend of the clients decided to take it on. Good luck!

 We’re only just beyond the groundworks stage with this one. The dig is finished and the hardcore is in and some of the sett edging is now down.

 I was able to photograph progress on Friday and here’s a small gallery of the going so far with a few ‘befores’ and ‘durings’…

I can confirm that sleep deprivation is one of the best ways of preventing blog posting that I can imagine. The days are spent desperately hanging onto your concentration by consuming industrial quantities of coffee and bought sandwiches. Evenings (ie blog writing time) are just a wreck.

Hopefully India will start a new ‘phase’ sometime soon….!

The culprit... butter wouldn't melt!

Prize

I mentioned some time ago that we’d won £1500 worth of stone from CED. Well I was wrong, even better we’d actually won £1500 worth of kit from Probst! I guess most landscapers are kit junkies and Tim is probably up there with the best of them so he had a whale of a time choosing what we wanted from their list. On Friday Nigel Hughes from Probst kindly came down to Stratford and presented Tim with the goods …

Tim (left) and Nigel Hughes with some of our new kit!

We should say here a hearty ‘Thanks Probst’ for their generous sponsorship of the awards. Really appreciated guys!

Aging Yew trees

A slightly misleading title – it’s not about yew trees that are getting old but about telling how old they are! I came accross a great website at the weekend that was devoted to Yews (I was actually looking for plants with associations to Christianity for a planting scheme outside a chapel) and one section was about aging them.

I don’t know about you but I always look at massive old trees with a sense of awe – what sights and events have they borne silent witness to over the years?  And I’ve lost count of the times I’ve been asked ‘how old is that tree?’ and I’ve usually had some wild stab at a guess.

Well now I can be slightly more accurate, certainly as far as yews are concerned. Check out this LINK..

Our business, The Gardenmakers, needs 3 skilled landscapers to augment the existing team. This is a great opportunity for career landscapers. You’ll need to be proficient at laying paving and constructing dwarf walls – and I do mean proficient.  We can direct your abilities to ‘our way’ of doing things from there.

We’re based in Banbury , north Oxfordshire and our work takes us into Warwickshire, the Cotswolds and Northamptonshire. We’ve won several awards for our gardens and we’re known nationally as a company that is dedicated to creating gardens of the highest possible standards.  We’re also renowned for our skill with laying York stone paving. Most of our work is on large country gardens but we’ll tackle any sized project with the same attention to detail.

Our approach is no-nonsense. We make gardens and we’re bloody good at it. You’ll learn a shed load of stuff and get to work on some fabulous projects.

Hours are 7.30am from our yard to 4.30pm on site. 20 days holiday plus 8 days bank holidays. Salary depends on how much experience you have.

Interested? Give me a call at the office on 01295 712 332 or my mobile 07962 155 433. Or drop me an email at info@the-gardenmakers.co.uk. If you want to see the sort of work we produce visit our website at www.the-gardenmakers.co.uk

Obviously most of you will be clutching yuor sides with mirth at the moment but for anybody who’s starting out in this game the flaws are:

• The paving has been laid with crossing joints.
• The Paving has joints that are too long (really they should only span 3 stones.) As it stands it’s a cross between coursed and random.
• The paving probably would benefit from some sort of pointing! But then those joints are quite big…..
• …because the stone has been laid upside down!

We see these sort of things all the time and let’s face it, how easy would it have been to have laid the stone correctly? It would have taken exactly the same amount of effort and time. Sometimes I despair!!

This is the area we’re looking at in the garden. The base of an old pool house and patio and the paving around the pool. Between us we’ve come up with a scheme for the area and now we just need to price it.

Landscaping project in Chipping Campden

After Broadway we dropped into one of our projects in Chipping Campden. Even though the photos suggest otherwise this job will be completed tomorrow so today was a hive of activity with the soft landscapers preparing the lawns and borders while Darrells team put the finishing touches to the paving, walls and pergola. Over the years we’ve found that getting the last pieces of a garden completed can seem to take an inordinate length of time so Tim has developed the  strategy of flooding them with labour for the last 2 days. It works well for us.

All too often I see, well frankly rubbish images gracing otherwise decent website sites. Photographs taken on mobile phones on murky days with the clients burgeoning washing-line in the background or some unknown landscaper standing vacantly in the middle distance. With a little thought and technique these images could have been a brilliant selling point. Instead they tell the viewers subconscious that the photographer couldn’t be bothered.

When we won our APL award last year the judges made a point of praising the quality of the images we presented and said they were a major factor in helping them come to their decision. They could actually see what they were judging in clear, crisp detail.

So how do you get a decent photograph?

 Get the right equipment. A half decent camera is an essential tool these days. Either purchase or borrow a digital SLR with a zoom lens in the range of 18-55 mm is perfect. Wider zooms offer more scope if the garden is very small but they start to get expensive.

 Use a tripod. Let me say that again. Use a tripod! And if possible pick a still day to reduce the chance of camera shake even further. You’re going to be using the camera at the widest possible aperture so it needs all the support it can get.

 Pick a clear day but avoid the middle of the day. Early morning and late afternoon light are best. Mid day light is harsh and will probably cause the image to overexpose.

 Keep the sun behind you as far as possible. So bearing this in mind decide what time of the day is best to get the shots you want. If you need to shoot in all directs (if you’ll excuse the expression) then you might need to make two visits.

 Do some gardening. Dead–head the roses, weed the borders, sweep the paths and put those kiddies toys away. Make sure that your shots are free from clutter. Tell the client in advance that you’re coming so that they don’t put the washing out or organise a garden party.

 Start taking shots at the beginning of a project so that you get more effective before-and-after shots.  Look at the design and decide on where the most effective finished shots will be. This will tell you where to shoot the ‘before’ pictures. Before-and-afters are incredibly powerful. I constructed a page on our website which allows you to pass the mouse over a ‘before’ picture to see what the ‘after’ looks like. It’s really effective! (You’ll note some classic mistakes as mentioned above – my epiphany on image quality is a recent development!)

 http://www.the-gardenmakers.co.uk/Before-&-afters.html

 Set the camera to the maximum aperture you can while maintaining a shutter speed of at least 1/60^th second (if you’re a photographer you’re going to howl that you can get away with less but for the purposes of this I’m trying to make it as fool proof as possible!) Keep the ISO reading to 400 or less and the aperture to f16 or above. Have a read of this link to get a better understanding of what you’re doing!

 http://www.digital-slr-guide.com/maximum-aperture.html

 Photograph everything and anything. Experiment with different shots, get down on your belly, climb up a ladder, shoot through the shrubbery and get some plants in the very foreground. By keeping that aperture to f16 or above you’re getting everything from the foreground to the background in sharp focus. If you want to highlight one feature – say and ornament – then adjust  the aperture down as low as possible (say F4) which will throw a certain amount of the foreground and background out of focus.

 And there you go. I bet you never thought it was so easy did you!

 The garden was created through the spring and summer of 2006 and I photographed it for the awards in the summer of 2008. It looked absolutly fantastic with the warm buff colours of the stone complimenting the house and planting perfectly. Let’s face it, it must have looked OK to have won the award!

Well, Tim and I visited the garden last week. We were particularly interested to see just what the weather is doing to our gardens over a period of years and we were slightly shocked with what we saw. The actual construction remains sound – as it should, we build gardens to last. But the aesthetic beauty of the garden was starting to diminish rapidly under the ravages of our Warwickshire weather. Moss had been allowed to gain a hold on the pointing joints and in the Breedon gravel paths. The Breedon was also suffering from attention by rabbits. The paving was dull and lack-lustre and the bases of the walls stained from driving rain splashing the soil from the borders. All in all it’s a far cry from those glory days onlya  couple of years ago.

So what’s gone wrong? Well nothing really, apart from our failing to educate our client and their gardener on how to maintain the garden properly. After an initial appraisal I was able to email the client and suggest a regime of moss-treatment for the paving and gravel and a good pressure-washing for the walls and paving. This will bring the whole garden back to life. The downer is that because moss has been allowed to gain a hold on the paving joints the pressure-washing will almost certainly blow out large sections which will need re-pointing. And there’s something like 500-sq metres on the whole project!

Time for that epoxy based pointing compound…

So what lessons can be learned from this?

• First we have to accept that the great British weather will do it’s utmost to destroy hard landscaping over time. That’s just the way nature works. All the more reason to make sure that the garden is built well and to last because the deterioration can be swift and devastating!
• Second we should manage our clients expectations while their garden still looks stunning. They need to know that a certain level of maintenance is essential if their garden is to remain in tip top condition.
• Third, we should be giving our clients the information they need to enable them to maintain the condition of their hard landscaping  features.
• Fourth. There is obviously an opportunity here. In the same way that we landscapers often end up maintaining the flower beds and the lawns of our creations we probably should be offering services to help maintain the hard elements too.

I don’t know about you guys but we go through the ringer with all of our projects. We nurture, cajole, coax and tend them into existence and we take it quite badly when we see them looking tired and unkempt. Seeing this garden has been a real wake-up call to us and will change the way we sign off our gardens. We are already thinking about the design of a ‘handover’ pack that will cover the above points and ensure that our gardens constinue to look great for many years after we’ve gone.