Landscape design and build • Algoma
A garden here has about twenty usable weeks.
Everything else about working in this climate follows from that one fact, including what we will take on in July and what we will honestly tell you to leave until spring.
Most landscape companies sell you a picture and work out the calendar afterwards. We would rather start with the calendar, because it is the part that decides whether you spend one summer looking at a building site or two.
The season
What can still be finished this year?
Pick a start month and the timeline below moves with it. The hatched bars are frost: nothing happens in them, no matter what anybody promises you in a quote.
How we work
Design first, and separately
The design is a paid piece of work with its own fee, and it is yours whether you build it with us or not. A free design is never free, it is folded into a build price you cannot compare with anybody else's.
We build in phases on purpose
Hard landscaping in one season, planting in the next. It spreads the cost, it lets the ground settle before anything living goes into it, and it means the plants go in at the right time of year rather than whenever the diggers happen to finish.
Plants are named on the quote
Species, size and quantity, not "assorted shrubs". Nobody can compare two landscape quotes where one of them says assorted shrubs, which is precisely why so many of them do.
We will tell you to wait
If you ring in August wanting a lawn down before the first frost, the honest answer is usually no. Seed put down late here does not root before the ground closes, and you will be re-doing it in May.
Talk to us
The first visit costs nothing and settles most of it
An hour in the garden, and by the end of it you will know whether this is a one season job or a two, roughly what it costs, and whether we are the right people for it. Sometimes the answer to the last one is no and we will say so.