Winter can be the best time for you to have your garden landscaped.

As Landscape Gardeners, we enjoy a lot of outdoors weather. In the spring and summer months our customers and friends often remark on their envy of us as outdoors workers… soaking up the rays as they sit looking longingly out of their office windows. Then leaves begin to fall and the temperature drops, days become shorter and our glamorous tans fade away along with the envy of our fellow office workers.

As the number of hours spent in your garden per week plummet in direct correlation with the temperature during these months, it is easy to push any thoughts of your garden’s existence out of your head completely until spring. As is usually the case, spring joyfully skips round the corner and presents you with a stark reminder that your garden isn’t just a cold place full of leaves covered in ice, it is something that needs attention once more. The plans you had last year come racing back and soon phone calls are being made to Landscape Gardeners across London. However, there may be a problem: this being a well-known annual phenomenon amongst Landscape Gardeners means that the work load increases for us dramatically, as a result the diary gets filled up and so does the waiting period for numerous people’s work to begin. What’s more, Landscapers may even quote higher as business is particularly fruitful this time of year and there is less of a need to be competitive.

So, if you’re on a tight budget then it might be an idea to get in there as early as possible, this might require thinking outside the box a little and having the work done in the dead of winter - we do still operate in these cold, dark months no matter how cold it is! This way your garden will already be an image of incandescent beauty underneath the new spring sun and you will be making use of your new outdoor space whilst others will still be waiting in line for the work to begin. Also, as mentioned above, if you get the work done in winter you will most likely get a cheaper quote.

So there you have it, winter isn’t all about staying indoors, spare a thought for your garden and plan ahead, it might be more beneficial than you think.

Written by chris Hind, landscape gardener at Danscape Gardens.

How to avoid the need for planning permission for your Driveway project.

 Sustainable drainage systems. (S.U.D.S).

Increasingly more and more people are having their front gardens landscaped, turning them into driveways to provide off street parking.  This has obvious benefits such as lower insurance premiums and a guaranteed parking space when you get home with a car load of shopping, but there is one negative environmental impact that you may not be aware of. By creating yet another hard, impermeable surface in an urban area which already has a very low percentage of free draining land, you would be adding to an existing drainage problem.

For example:  If a front garden that consisted of a small path, a lawn and a flower bed was completely paved over, the rain water that used to drain slowly through the permeable surfaces of the original garden would now run off the new paving.  It would then go down into the already overworked sewers, some of which are up to a hundred years old, and then either on to the effluent treatment works or out into our natural water courses.

Obviously it is not a good idea to send rain water to a place where it is treated the same as sewage, but is there any harm in sending it out to the streams and rivers? Well the answer is yes because over 90% of rain that falls in urban areas in the U.K. is classed as “run off” (70% in sub-urban areas)so, during periods of prolonged heavy rain, a city the size of London can funnel vast amount of water out very quickly which can cause flooding further down the line.

More vehicles on our roads mean more pollutants, especially hydrocarbons get mixed into the run-off water and when directed out to our natural watercourses they can cause devastating effects to the fauna and flora of our streams and rivers.

Since the 1^st October 2008, planning permission has been required if you would like to pave over five square metres in your front garden using non permeable paving.

There are however several solutions:

You can pay £150 and apply for planning permission then wait up to eight weeks for decision (not recommended).

You can use a perimable paving solution i.e. permeable block paving. (Not always the most attractive option)

If you have a large enough front garden you can tilt your paving towards a flower bed or “rain garden” thus allowing the water to drain down into the earth.

The most practical solution we have found, considering the limited size of many gardens, is to dig a soak away and channel the water that runs off the paving down to it.  This water is slowly released into the earth and down to the water table at a manageable rate.  This is, in my opinion, the best solution as we can continue to offer a choice of materials including the ever popular natural stone paving.