In this unique project our clients wanted a garden that was almost completely maintenance free.

They asked us to design a new patio, create an artificial lawn and a gravel garden in a tricky area in the garden. They also wanted to level the garden and create a nicer access to their shed.

Somewhat unusually, we began this project by removing the whole garden and taking out thirty five tons of soil.

A fundamental element of building a solid, robust, long lasting garden is ensuring you have prepared good foundations. This applies especially to paving and artificial lawns. Poor preparation may save money in the short term, but the long term effect will be sunken, failed paving and lawns.

So, after removing the soil, we imported a similar amount of hardcore, which we levelled and compacted.

For the paving we installed a lovely sunset buff Indian Sandstone, which was jointed with a contrasting grey grout, which nicely picked up the charcoal edging blocks.

For the lawn the customer chose "Summer Lawn 30mm" from Marshalls Always Green collection. This is a premium artificial lawn, which is deep and lush, and has to be seen to be believed.

We install our artificial lawns on 75mm of compacted hardcore, toped with 25mm of compacted crushed granite. This creates a solid, level and long lasting surface, which will not suffer from dips and failure over time.

In contrast to installing a sand base, crushed granite also creates a sub-surface which does not retain odours, a big plus if you intend to let pets out onto your lawn.