Who needs a garden designer?
After all, there are plenty of people who’ll give you ideas. There’s Diarmuid on the telly – good, low budget stuff there. Then there’s the building contractor who said he’ll lay a few second-hand slabs over the old concrete patio so that, for a few thousand euro, you can get a new garden that looks as unfinished and tatty as the old one. Then there’s the brother-in-law who is terribly proud of the fussy 3-tiered deck he built in his garden, together with the gravel bits with the black plastic sheeting showing through, and that statue of a girl who sounds like a cistern filling as she pours water from an urn. He’s dying to design your garden. Surrounded by experts who just seem to make you more confused? A good garden designer is armed with a wealth of practical knowledge, on what finishes work well, how much things cost, what to look out for when choosing a contractor, how to make a small garden look bigger and a large garden more manageable. And then there are the aesthetics.
