Garden Landscape Design Services
At Floral & Hardy, we offer both hard and soft landscaping services to clients in London, Surrey and Kent.
Landscaping is an essential component of gardening that enables both the soft elements of your garden – such as the planted flowers, trees and shrubs – to work harmoniously with the hard elements of your garden. This includes fencing, walls, and patios. Our expertise helps you to combine each and every aspect of your garden space, ensuring everything is carefully placed to achieve the right look. Our comprehensive service means that you don’t have to worry about hiring different tradespeople to add lighting or install water features, as the entire project is managed from start to finish by our highly experienced garden landscapers.
What is landscape gardening?
Landscape gardening looks at ways in which to combine all features of the garden, both living and not, to make a cohesive, enjoyable space.
Successfully blending these features is crucial to ensuring both the desired aesthetics and usability of the space is achieved. Being able to take a space and combine hard and soft landscape materials from scratch is a skill, as is being able to rearrange and repurpose existing spaces. Our professional landscaping architects are able to work with either new builds or existing designs to integrate essential elements such as walkways, water features, grass, trees and shrubbery, flowers, hanging baskets, turf, lighting, paved areas, steps and furniture. For homeowners who want to elevate the look and feel of their outdoor living space by introducing a smart and intuitive layout, professional landscaping services are ideal.
Landscape gardening can completely transform the look and feel of your outdoor space; with many years of experience in creating dream gardens, Floral & Hardy can turn your vision into a reality. We spend time with our clients, listening to your ideas and thinking about the practicalities of the proposed planning before coming up with detailed outlines for the design. This allows us to create landscaped gardens that are beautiful, practical, and suit your lifestyle.
The difference between hard and soft landscaping
Hard landscaping, also known as hardscaping, refers to hard and often movable elements of the garden, such as:
- Gravel
- Paving stones
- Walkways
- Walls
- Stones (decorative)
- Outdoor kitchens and dining space
- Decks
- Lights and speaker system
- Sheds and wendy houses
- Gazebos
Hardscaping objects are inanimate, so they do not make up the living contingent of the garden. They can be used to serve a practical purpose, such as to segregate areas or reduce water run-off, or they can serve a purely decorative purpose.
Softscaping on the other hand refers to the horticultural elements of the garden, such as:
- Flowers
- Trees
- Soil
- Shrubs
- Grass and artificial turf
These are the “living” components of the space, which work together with the hard landscaping elements mentioned above. They require maintenance and sometimes moving and replanting depending on the plant and the layout of the space.
Striking the right ratio and combination of these hard and soft landscaping elements can create an eye-catching space that achieves the desired ambience. At Floral & Hardy, we take great pride in getting this contrast just right so that every colour, shape and texture is beautifully showcased in a showstopping finished garden.
Inspiration for landscape gardening ideas
To start with, you want to take into consideration the space in terms of square footage in the garden.
How much room is there with which to work in total? How much of this is to be practical, usable space, and what does that leave for decorative items? In which direction is the garden facing? What is the current soil profile, and how will this lend itself to the installation of any water features? Our expert landscape gardeners will start by taking a look at the overall space to see how best to combine both hard and soft elements. Of course, you want the garden to be visually pleasing, and so at this point your landscaper will start looking at the ways in which the aesthetics can be enhanced.
There are all sorts of elements you may want to discuss with your landscape gardener, such as:
- Gravel
- Woodchips
- Ponds (with lilies and goldfish)
- Waterfalls
- Brightly coloured foliage
- Sitting space
Each year brings new garden trends, and at Floral & Hardy we ensure that we can offer the garden features that people want. You might want to add an outdoor pizza oven, or sunken trampoline and wonder how to integrate this into your garden design. Whether you need help with hard or soft landscaping ideas, Floral & Hardy can help.
About our landscape gardening services
At Floral & Hardy, we understand that your garden is an extension of your living space.
It is therefore important that your garden works well not just in terms of the elements within it, but also as part of the property as a wider whole. If there’s a particular style or theme that you would like for your garden, then we can work out how to create a practical, beautiful garden based on your look. We’ve created garden landscape in traditional, minimalist, and contemporary designs in both rural and urban environments, and can do so by providing the following landscaping services:
- Working around existing foundations, brickwork, and features
- Maximising space
- Working with your garden’s size and shape limitations
- Accessibility
- Ordering soft and hard landscaping materials
- Creating a theme for the botany in your garden – i.e. Japanese, tropical
- Adding groundwork such as patios, paths, stone features, paving, driveways, and car parks
- Creating flower beds and arrangements of various shapes and sizes
- Maintenance – i.e. soils, irrigation, plant feeding, groundwater recharge, improving drainage
- Adding water or light features – Including fountains, ponds, streams, LED Lighting, mood
- lighting, spot lighting
- Fencing and bordering
- Landscape management
- Plant replacements
- Garden inspections
- Surveying
You may be inspired by serene Japanese gardens, be thinking about growing your own food, or want a garden that feels rustic and natural. Whatever your particular tastes, we can tailor the style to suit your garden space.
Ready to find a gardener? Make an enquiry today
Here at Floral & Hardy, we offer a full landscape gardening service to residents of London, Surrey and Kent. If you are looking for a leading garden design and landscaping company then look no further – our bespoke, hand-drawn garden designs can help with the planning and creation of your garden.
Floral & Hardy is made up of a skilled team of landscape gardeners and landscape contractors who have many years of experience in landscape architecture, horticulture, agriculture, landscape engineering, architecture, and the applied arts, meaning we are able to combine all these elements to create the perfect garden, front yard & outdoor communal areas. We work across the South East of England including areas such as London, Kent, Surrey, and Essex.
If you are thinking of giving your garden a makeover, then call us today on 0844 884 2425 for more information.
