Case Study

East Boldre, Nr Beaulieu, Hampshire

A London based garden designer contacted us on behalf of this client to tender for the hard landscape construction of this large garden.

The design that the client had commissioned comprised of the following: Large natural stone paved area wrapping round three sides of the property, a small summer house/gazebo, natural pond with oval deck, large curved lawn areas surrounded by deep planting beds, vegetable garden of raised sleeper beds and a slight re-shaping of the gravel drive with brick edged planting beds.

The client was also led to believe that their garden contained an old well that once we had cleared the garden they were hoping we would be able to carry out some restoration work to either make a feature of it within the garden or utilise as a water source for irrigation of their new garden, to reduce the reliance on using tap water.

Once construction got underway and we had stripped the garden, we located the 'well'. As it was much closer to the property that originally expected and looked to be in an unstable state we called in a structural engineer to get advice on how best to deal with it. The engineer carried out a survey and determined that it was not a well, but a soak away and that as it was so close to the house, it would need to be filled in and capped off and re-sited to a new location in the garden. As this would require a fair amount of ground works, we suggested that the client considered installing an underground water storage tank at the same time, the idea being that they could harvest rainwater for watering their garden. This was agreed and we arranged for a specialist contractor to carry out the works.

After the tank and new soak away were installed, we were able to cap off the old well/soak away and continue with the build of the garden.

As the house was orginally an old schoolhouse and had been subject to various building works over the years, we were presented with a few other challenges during the build including a brick plinth around the house that had been causing damp problems - we removed this and had part of the house re-rendered, various drainage pipes that needed relocation and an oil tank supply pipe that was only inches from the surface without any protection. These are not usually landscaping tasks, but as we have a multi-skilled team, we were able to deal with them and carry on with the build.

Apart from the dreadfully wet weather during the build and having to cope with a waterlogged garden a few times the rest of the build went well and we completed our part of the build in July 2007. The garden has since been planted up and our clients are delighted to have a lovely new garden.

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