Garden landscaping: when do you start planning?

You can do the garden planning in several steps. 1. Structural planning "now" - e.g. paving, paths, buildings, style, special features such as shaping terrain, swimming pool, pond, fire pit... - with this you can agree with the developer on "no go" zones for machines and heavy equipment in order to keep some soil uncompacted. For this, a view of the plans with the landscape gardener and a good hourly rate for the discussions is sufficient. 2. Execution planning "later" - the shell construction is complete and you get a better idea of the spatial dimensions and light. It is easier to develop ideas and talk with the landscape gardener. Use the same one if you already had a good experience in stage 1.

Do it yourself in small steps, because you quickly lose 25,000 - 100,000€ if you have it done. Most of it is just dull hard work, for very few things you need incredible skill and decades of experience.

Well, I would never pay 2000 euros just to get a plan and an offer, unless I didn’t care what everything would cost later on. There are also people who can and want to afford 100,000 euros for landscape gardening. I planned our garden myself, we had paths compacted with gravel as part of the pool work, and later we hired a landscape gardener for paving. By the way, one wanted over 16,000 euros for that, another only 6,000 euros. These big price differences were present in all garden work here, for example setting L-stones or strip foundations for the garage.

Best regards Sabine

Here we even submitted the site plan with the building application – and had to do so. On the one hand, the development plan here states that the natural terrain in its topography outside the building structures and terrace must be preserved, which we thus demonstrated; and we also included compacted areas, terraces, which also count towards the floor space index. And in addition, the location of the prefabricated garage and driveway.

Of course, DIY is great fun and more than "just work." Depending on the terrain, it makes sense to think through the rough plan beforehand and sketch it out. We only had the driveway, a few stone walls, and a fence made. Then we considered what should go where, because we have quite a few plans, including a permaculture area, greenhouse, whirlpool, shower and sauna, chickens, fire pit, dog run, space for chopping wood... There are years of work to do. Great!

I would first think about where everything should go. This can be done with software or on a large sheet of paper (wallpaper or something similar). Maybe then you realize that you don't need a garden landscaper or only for very few tasks.

I can only speak from my own experience that if you are not afraid to get dirty sometimes, you can definitely create a garden yourself. In our case, everything has always been done as much as possible by ourselves. So, we laid lawn, planted trees and shrubs, and if they ever became a nuisance or died (I mean after decades), we also dug them up again.

You should also ask yourself whether you want a purely ornamental garden or a functional garden or a combination of both.

You should keep in mind that an ornamental garden, if you want it to look decent, may not necessarily require less work throughout the year, maybe even more, than a functional garden.