What you're paying for, and when.

Ruth comes to the garden, walks it with you and listens to how you actually want to use it. You come away the same afternoon with ideas and honest, practical direction — what to keep, what to change and what will thrive where.

The fee is deducted in full from your design cost if you decide to go ahead, so the advice effectively becomes free. Many clients start exactly here, unsure of what their garden could be.

Ruth surveys the plot accurately — dimensions, levels, aspect, what stays and what goes — then draws a scaled concept design that resolves the whole garden: borders, structure, sight-lines and routes through.

This is the stage that stops expensive mistakes. You can stand back and see how the whole garden fits together on paper before a single spade goes in — and every trade that follows has a clear plan to work to.

The planting is where a design comes alive. Ruth chooses plants for your soil, aspect and the feel you are after, then supplies and installs them so the borders read as one considered scheme rather than a trolley-dash.

Priced separately from the design so you can see exactly what the planting itself costs — and phase it over seasons if you would like to. It is the work clients describe as turning a patch of grass into “a riot of colour.”

Where a garden needs building — patios, paths, levels, structures — you do not have to go and find a contractor yourself. Ruth introduces a landscaper she trusts and co-ordinates the work against her drawings.

One point of contact, one plan, and a designer keeping the build true to the concept. “The landscapers she recommended did a lovely job on the patio,” wrote one client, “and then Ruth came back to the planting.”

A newly designed garden is at its most vulnerable in its first seasons. On new gardens Ruth includes three seasonal tidy-ups a year — editing, feeding and shaping the young planting through the year.

It is the difference between planting that establishes and grows into the design, and planting that is abandoned the day the last plant goes in. It is also why so many clients have Ruth back for the next stage.