Garden design in Surbiton

Every project begins with a proper reading of the site and how you intend to live in it. Our garden design and build service turns that into a considered scheme, and for clients who want everything resolved before work starts, we provide scaled designs and plans with layouts, levels and written planting schemes.

Surbiton’s period properties often bring narrow plots, limited side access and overlooked boundaries. These are exactly the conditions we enjoy resolving, whether the answer is a well-proportioned courtyard garden, a clever side return, or carefully detailed fencing and screening.

Once a design is agreed, our team carries out the construction, covering the full range of hard and soft landscaping. This includes patios, paths and driveways, decking, pergolas, retaining walls, garden lighting and other garden features and structures.

• Properly prepared sub-bases for paving and patios
• Level changes and retaining details for sloping gardens
• Decking, pergolas and garden structures
• Low-maintenance layouts for compact gardens
• Hard and soft landscaping handled together

On the town’s many sloping and split-level plots, well-detailed retaining and stepped, split-level solutions do much of the quiet work. Where a smaller garden needs to look good with little upkeep, we also design dedicated low-maintenance gardens.

Alongside the structural work, a few features come up again and again with Surbiton homeowners.

• Naturalistic, pollinator-friendly planting
• Relaxed courtyard gardens
• Porcelain or stone paving softened with gravel and planting
• Pergolas for height, shade and structure
• Raised sleeper beds for heavy clay gardens

Naturalistic borders work particularly well here, using clay-tolerant plants such as Salvia nemorosa, Nepeta racemosa, Echinacea purpurea and Verbena bonariensis. You can see the wider design thinking on our naturalistic garden page.

Surbiton’s Victorian villa roads, including the stuccoed terraces around Claremont Road, Maple Road and St Andrew’s Square, were built with handsome front gardens. We restore that detail with a sympathetic hand.

• Lifting, cleaning and re-bedding original geometric or encaustic tiles
• Matching replacement tiles to surviving patterns and colours
• Relaying paths on a sound, free-draining base
• Repairing or rebuilding period dwarf walls
• Reinstating piers, copings, railings or gates where appropriate

Within Surbiton’s conservation areas, we keep materials and detailing in keeping with the street, and can combine period walls with sympathetic fencing and screening.

Our garden maintenance service keeps planting healthy and the whole space in balance as it establishes, carried out by trained horticulturists rather than general gardeners.

• Seasonal pruning and plant care
• Lawn care and hedge work
• Maintenance for small or low-maintenance gardens
• Large garden maintenance in Berrylands and nearby areas
• Communal garden maintenance for apartment blocks

We tailor each programme to the garden, from the regular care of a small or low-maintenance space near the station to larger garden maintenance in Berrylands and scheduled communal garden maintenance around Surbiton town centre.

Like much of the borough, Surbiton sits on heavy London Clay, which holds water in winter, shrinks and cracks in summer, and has a direct bearing on drainage, lawns and planting. Getting the soil right is the foundation of everything that follows, which is why we put real care into improving clay soil.

Clay-tolerant planting earns its place here too, and dependable performers such as Hydrangea paniculata, Amelanchier lamarckii, Sarcococca confusa and reliably clay-happy roses feature regularly in our Surbiton schemes.

Where heavy ground and the area’s gentle slopes towards the Thames lead to persistent waterlogging, our flooded garden solutions resolve the problem at its source rather than masking it. We are also mindful of the town’s conservation areas and mature trees, and design with those local sensitivities in view.