Landscaping and garden builds
Twenty years of building gardens people actually use.
Paving, decking, walling, turfing and water features within 25 miles of Stroud, planned around how you will use the space rather than how it photographs.
Paving, decking, walling, turfing and water features within 25 miles of Stroud, planned around how you will use the space rather than how it photographs.
Some of it is groundwork you will never see again. Some of it is the part you sit on. All of it below.
Laid on a proper base with the falls right, so it drains instead of puddling.
Somewhere level to sit in a garden that slopes, built to take weather and use.
Retaining and boundary walls that turn a bank into usable ground.
Ground prepared and levelled first, which is the difference between a lawn and a bumpy green patch.
From a quiet trough to a full pond, plumbed properly so it keeps working.
Boundaries done straight and solid alongside the rest of the build.
Three stages, the same on every job, so you always know where you are up to.
Someone visits, looks at the job properly and talks it through with you: what is involved, what the options are, and anything that needs checking first. You get a quote from that visit.
Once you are happy, the job goes in the diary. You know what is being done, who is coming and when.
The job is completed as agreed and the site is left tidy, with the waste taken away.
None of this is specific to us. It applies to hard landscaping anywhere, and it is where most of the money is either well spent or wasted.
If you lay more than five square metres of new impermeable surface in a front garden, you need planning permission unless the water can run off to a permeable area within your own property. Permeable paving, gravel, or a drainage channel feeding a border normally keeps the job inside permitted development. This is one of the most commonly missed rules in domestic landscaping and it is worth settling before anything is ordered.
A patio or drive is only as good as the sub-base beneath it. That means excavating to a proper depth, laying and compacting stone in layers, and only then bedding the paving. Laying slabs onto soil, sand or an old surface is quicker and cheaper and it is why patios sink, rock and open up at the joints. When you compare quotes, compare the excavation depth and the build-up, because that is the difference and it is not visible once it is finished.
Paving next to a house has to shed water away from the building, and it has to finish far enough below the damp proof course that rain cannot bridge it. A surface that looks perfectly flat is usually built with a slight, deliberate fall. Getting this wrong causes damp inside the house, which is expensive in a way that a patio is not.
Concrete paving is the cheapest, comes in the widest range and can fade over time. Natural sandstone and limestone have variation and character, are porous, and benefit from sealing. Porcelain is dense, very stable in colour, resists staining and algae, and costs more to buy and to lay because it needs cutting with the right equipment and a slurry primer. None is simply better. They differ in what you will be doing to keep them looking right in ten years.
Greaterscapes has been landscaping around Stroud for over twenty years, covering a 25-mile radius that takes in Cheltenham, Gloucester and Bristol. Full design and build or a single project, and either way the plan starts with what you want the garden to do.
Not "great service, highly recommend". Actual jobs, described by the people who paid for them.
Every one of those is public. Search the name on Google and read them before you call anyone, including us.
If your village is not on the list it is worth ringing anyway. It is usually the access and the size of the job that decide whether we can help, not the postcode.
Ring us, or leave your details and we will call you back. Tell us roughly what you are looking at and we will take it from there.
01453 752797Or call and speak to us directly.