After the Fanfare of Design and Installation
I'm on the drive to see a client. I've just had a text from them. In a very English way, they're not quite saying what they really think, but it's fair to say their expectations aren't being met. It's stuck with me the whole drive, because it raises a question that sits underneath almost everything we do: what actually is a garden?
Here's the truth of it.
What we, and every garden designer, are actually designing is a living system. Not a static picture you could hang above the fireplace and admire, unchanging, forever. What people are paying for, when they pay the design fee, the installation fee, when they buy the plants and the stone and the gravel and the seed, is a ticket to a process.
An ever-changing process of plant ecology:
spring vibrancy, a near-dormant summer, maybe a second flush in autumn. A lot of our industry has a habit of designing a garden, installing it, taking the portfolio photos eighteen months later when it looks its absolute best, and then losing interest. In my opinion, a designer should want to be involved in year one, year two, year five, year ten. And here's a line that probably sounds commercially suicidal: the design is not the most valuable thing we give a client. It's the ongoing advice. The tutorials. The gardening lessons.
The Story
This garden was installed in July 2025. Since then there's been no meaningful site visit, nothing beyond the odd WhatsApp photo of "is this a weed?" That's maybe an eighth of what the client actually needed. What David and I found when we arrived was a garden that had been through two months of extreme drought, and a client quietly wondering if they'd wasted their money. So we walked it properly: the meadow, the borders, all of it. From our perspective, it was exactly where we'd expect it to be. Very few losses. Not much flower colour, but everything re-sprouting from the base, easing into natural senescence rather than dying. The clients had spent plenty of time in the garden and thought they were maintaining it, but they hadn't grasped gardening as disturbance. No hard pruning, no scarifying, no disturbing the soil. That stillness is exactly what had cost them the succession of colour they wanted. So we got the secateurs out. Cut a tired chicory right back to two buds off the ground, and looked at what was underneath: seedlings of wild carrot, self-sown evening primrose, a pulmonaria that had been quietly suppressed the whole time. None of it would have shown itself without intervention.
That's the whole method in miniature: you observe, you intervene a little, and the garden feeds the answer back to you next season. What we saw on their faces, once the cutting started, was relief. It's easy to write "ongoing support" as a line on a website. It's a different thing entirely to be standing in the border with your hands full of prunings, explaining in real time why this cut matters. We don't come as garden designers on a day like that. We come as teachers.
Maintenance is not optional.
It's not a soft add-on to the job. It is the job. If you're thinking about a new garden, that's the honest version. There's the cost of getting it started. And then there's the cost of learning to keep it alive, in every sense.
The Author
Daniel Lee (BSc) is the founder of Teasels Biodiverse Design Consultancy, based in Cambridge. He specialises in ecological garden design, wildflower meadow creation, habitat design, and rewilding, with a practice built on the belief that ecological thinking isn't a bolt-on, it's the foundation. Teasels works across East Anglia, South-East England, and London, designing gardens that work with their environment rather than against it: wildlife ponds, prairie and meadow planting, biodiverse roofs, and habitat-rich spaces for private clients, community projects, and larger landowners looking to rewild.
Daniel is also hosts The Biodiversity Podcast on YouTube, where he explores the intersection of ecology, land management, and design with practitioners and experts from across the field.
