How Much Does It Cost to Landscape a Garden?

For most UK gardens, a full landscaping project — new patio or decking, some lawn work, planting, and a boundary or two — typically runs from around £3,000 for a modest garden refresh to £25,000 or more for a full redesign of a larger plot with retaining walls, a garden room, or extensive hard landscaping. The honest answer to "how much will my garden cost" is that it depends entirely on which of these elements you need and how much of the garden they cover, which is why this guide breaks the total down by individual job rather than quoting one meaningless average.

Garden landscaping costs are driven mostly by two things: the amount of hard landscaping (paving, walling, decking) versus soft landscaping (turf, planting, borders), and access. A garden with narrow side access that materials have to be wheelbarrowed through will cost noticeably more in labour than one a mini-digger and dumper can drive straight into, regardless of the finished design being identical.

Typical costs by element

Rather than one all-in figure, it's far more useful to budget garden by garden, element by element. Here's what each of the main jobs typically costs in the UK as a starting range — see the dedicated guide linked for each one for a fuller breakdown:

• Patio: roughly £50-£120 per square metre depending on material (concrete slab at the low end, natural stone or porcelain at the high end) — see our patio cost guide.
• Driveway: roughly £40-£120 per square metre depending on whether you choose tarmac, block paving, or resin-bound — see our driveway cost guide.
• Decking: typically £100-£250 per square metre installed depending on timber or composite — see our guide to how much decking you need.
• Fencing: typically £80-£180 per linear metre depending on fence type and height — see our fencing cost guide.
• Retaining walls: typically £150-£350 per square metre of wall face depending on material and engineering requirements — see our retaining wall cost guide.
• Artificial grass: typically £40-£90 per square metre installed, versus real turf at roughly £15-£35 per square metre — see our comparison of artificial vs real grass.
• Garden room or outbuilding: anywhere from around £4,000 for a basic uninsulated timber structure to £20,000+ for a fully insulated, powered garden office — see our garden room cost guide.
• Pergola or gazebo: typically £500 for a basic DIY kit up to £6,000+ for a bespoke built structure — see our pergola and gazebo cost guide.
• Greenhouse: from around £300 for a small aluminium kit to £5,000+ for a larger bespoke cedar-framed greenhouse with a proper base — see our greenhouse cost guide.

What actually drives the total cost

Beyond material choice, four things move a landscaping quote more than anything else. Access — as mentioned above, a garden that can be reached by machinery is cheaper to work in than one requiring hand-barrowing of every tonne of hardcore and paving. Groundwork — if the existing ground needs significant levelling, or there's a slope requiring retaining structures, this can add thousands before a single paving slab goes down. Drainage — UK gardens with poor natural drainage often need additional work (soakaways, channel drains) folded into a landscaping quote, and skipping this is a common way projects go wrong later. Waste removal — clearing an existing garden (old decking, concrete, overgrown planting) and disposing of it responsibly is real cost that's easy to underestimate when budgeting from scratch.

DIY vs hiring a landscaper

Straightforward jobs — laying a small area of artificial grass, building a basic pergola from a kit, general planting — are realistic for a competent DIYer with the right tools and a weekend or two. Anything involving structural retaining work, drainage, damp-proofing near the house, or significant excavation is worth having assessed by a professional even if you plan to do some of the labour yourself, since getting groundwork wrong is expensive and sometimes dangerous to put right afterwards.

Common mistakes when budgeting for garden landscaping

• Forgetting groundwork and drainage in the budget — these are often 20-30% of a project's true cost but get left out of early estimates because they're invisible in the finished result.
• Not sequencing the work correctly. Structural elements (retaining walls, drainage, base preparation for paving or decking) need to happen before the visible finishes go in — redoing a patio because the retaining wall behind it wasn't built first is an expensive way to learn this.
• Underestimating access costs. Always ask a landscaper to walk the actual access route with you before pricing is finalised — a garden that looks accessible from the front can turn out to need everything carried through the house.

Once you've got a sense of which elements your garden actually needs, the individual cost guides linked throughout this page go into much more detail on materials, installation process, and what to watch out for with each one.

Getting quotes and comparing them fairly

When comparing landscaping quotes, make sure each one is pricing the same scope of work — it's common for one quote to include waste removal, drainage and a proper sub-base while a cheaper-looking quote quietly excludes them, only for those costs to appear later as "extras" once work has started. Ask each landscaper to itemise groundwork, materials and labour separately, and to confirm in writing what's included in any "supply and fit" price. It's also worth asking how they'll protect existing features you want to keep (mature trees, established borders, drainage runs) during the work, since damage to these during groundwork is a common and avoidable source of disputes.

Seasonal timing

Hard landscaping (patios, walls, driveways) can generally be carried out year-round, though very wet or frozen ground makes groundwork slower and can affect how well concrete and mortar cure. Turf and planting are best done in spring or autumn when the ground is workable and plants aren't under summer heat stress. If your project mixes both hard and soft landscaping, sequencing the hard landscaping first and finishing with turf and planting in a suitable season is usually the most sensible order, both for the plants' sake and to avoid new turf being damaged by ongoing construction traffic.

Finally, don't overlook the value of a phased plan drawn up at the start even if you can't fund the whole thing at once — a landscaper who understands the eventual full scope can make sure early-stage groundwork (drainage runs, levels, access points) doesn't need to be redone later when you come to build out the next phase.