Considering having some building work done on your home? If so, now is the perfect time to factor your garden into those considerations too. As Garden Designers who often follow on after builders have left a property, we can find some pretty shocking things. Not all of the time thankfully, but enough to know it’s an industry wide problem for many homeowners so it’s good to get ahead of the game if you can, and some – if not all – of the points below are a good idea to discuss with your builder preferably at quoting stage or at the very least, a pre-build meeting.

Think about your garden/s (both front and back if you have them) and try to be clear about what – if anything - you want to protect. Identify those things right at the outset, before any building work begins – before you’ve even got quotes for building – for instance, garden plants and trees, family space and/or access, elements like patios or water features, etc.

If builders know at the outset (i.e. at the point of being asked to quote) what it is you’re expecting of them you can both agree how things might happen throughout the build, for instance:

• Designate areas:
  • Consider having strict ‘no go’ areas that builders, their equipment and supplies aren’t allowed to encroach upon and ensure they are clearly marked as such. This might be areas of lawns and borders, for instance. Don't forget you might still be living in your property while work is being done so you might need some outdoor space to be available when your builders aren't on site - you shouldn't need to be imprisoned inside when you're having work done on your house, especially at weekends or evenings.
  • Ask builders to put up protective fencing or a visual barrier around trees and their roots and/or borders; this tells all their workers and those delivering that they can’t cross that line. Plant roots, especially trees, need to breathe so any compaction will be detrimental to their health. Protect tree trunks too.
  • Create an agreed route in and out of the site with a view to keeping soil compaction down. Compaction makes it very difficult to sustain plant and soil life. Board the route to help spread the weight of footfall, vehicles and machinery.
  • Agree a designated area for storage of materials and equipment as well as for waste materials for onward collection, it helps the organisation of the site as well as making it tidier for you and your neighbours!
• Don’t forget waste water disposal too. So often water used for washing tools or cement mixers is just thrown onto grass/lawns, under hedges or down the drain! This ‘slurry’ has so many chemicals that can render soil lifeless for quite some time, it can also change the pH of earth and kill off micro-organisms that live in it. Slurry needs to be dealt with properly so there is no damage to water courses or your garden. It can be used in an added-value way – for instance as hollow concrete block wall back-fill, or in sub-bases but if no positive use is possible, it can be poured over waste masonry in skips that contain no organic materials. (This is a good point to be aware of even if you're having small jobs done on your property - think plasterers, decorators, painters, etc.... the list goes on.)

Protect gardens from compaction: Often known affectionately as 'tonney bags' bulk bags are heavy! (the clue is in the nickname!), so storing them under trees, right on top of a tree's roots is not a good practice. Tree roots need to breathe so compaction will be detrimental to a tree's health.

Some builders will have their own set of ‘green’ credentials but it’s important to ask to see them and ask everyone who's quoting how they will look after your land whilst transforming your home. Whilst homeowners need to be realistic about impending deliveries and storage requirements for hard landscaping materials, builders need to also know that all of a homeowner’s property is not a free access-for-all and sundries, so compromises will need to be made on both sides. But what you don’t want is to have to spend even more money needlessly dealing with contaminated or compacted soil or waste in your garden or a long list of damaged or dead and dying plants once builders have left (which has, unfortunately been the case, for some of our clients). So agreeing a plan of attack at the outset – and getting it written into contracts – is in both parties’ best interests.

Existing home owners at least have the opportunity to potentially influence what happens in their gardens during a build. We have also designed gardens for new build properties and our experience of these gardens is quite scary; very little viable soil, ground that has been badly compacted and contaminated; buried waste, severe drainage issues and often poor-quality turf laid to cover what’s left are just some of the horrors our landscapers have discovered. At the moment there’s no real legislation for builders to leave the earth in a good condition after they’ve finished so many don’t (though there is a Defra released, non-binding Construction Code of Practice for the Sustainable Use of Soils on Construction Sites); our industry is pushing for codes like this to become binding but we’re not there yet. So, if you’re able to influence things right from the start, we’d highly recommend it!