A garden is planned at the kitchen table in January, searched for in February, quoted in March and built in May if you are lucky. The customer looking at websites for landscapers in Dublin has a saved folder of other people’s gardens, a number in their head they have not said out loud, and three or four firms open in tabs. They are comparing finished gardens, reading reviews, looking for a rough idea of cost, and checking whether you design as well as build. The firm whose site answers those gets the site visit, and the site visit is where you win it.
Enquiries arrive in February and the year is booked by May
Landscaping has a hard season. The first dry weekend in February, the searches start, and by the time the clocks change you are quoting every evening. A good firm is booked through to autumn by the end of spring. Then the enquiries keep coming, and each one wants to know when you can start.
The page should carry the answer. “Now booking from September” at the top, changed from your phone as the diary moves, means the people who ring already know. It also quietly tells them you are busy for a reason. In winter the same line can say you are taking bookings for spring, and that hard landscaping, walls, patios, drainage, goes ahead in the cold months when the ground allows.
Show the garden from where they stand
The best photo of a garden is taken from the kitchen window, because that is where the owner will look at it every morning for ten years. The second best is from the back door, and the third is from the far end looking back at the house. Take all three on the day you finish, and the same three on the day you arrived.
Then the details: the edging where the lawn meets the gravel, the step down to the patio, the lighting at dusk, the planting a year on if you can get back to photograph it. Under each garden, the area and the brief in one line: “Small north-facing garden in Phibsborough, patio, raised beds, a place for a table.” People search for gardens like theirs.
If you also do driveways and paving, keep them on their own page. A homeowner looking for a garden does not want to scroll past six driveways, and the paving and driveway work is found by a different search.
Price bands, design fees and the quote that takes a week
Nobody expects a fixed price for a garden online, but everyone wants a sense of scale, and the firm that gives it saves itself a dozen wasted site visits. A starting band for a typical small city garden with a patio, lawn and planting, a band for a larger suburban garden, and a note on what pushes it up: levels, access through the house, drainage, retaining walls, mature planting.
Say how you work. Whether you charge for a design and take it off the job if they go ahead. How long a quote takes after the visit. Your deposit and stage payments, in plain words, before anyone agrees to anything. If you are unsure how to word deposit terms, we wrote a guide on taking deposits online in Ireland that covers what Irish consumer law expects.
An enquiry with the photos already attached
The enquiry form on a landscaper’s site asks for the garden size, a few photos from the back door, what they want from the space, a budget range and when they hope to have it done. It lands in your email and on WhatsApp. You can rule out the ones that will not work from the van and arrange a visit with the ones that will.
That one form, in March, is worth more than anything else on the site. It turns the evening of calls into a list you work through in order.
What to send us
Your best eight gardens, with befores if you have them, and the area of each. Your price bands and your design fee. Your deposit and stage terms. The areas you cover, and whether you travel for the right job. A gardener you pass maintenance work to, if you have one, so the two pages can point at each other. Ten minutes on the phone.
The plan and the price
Essentials is the right plan for most landscaping firms: €499 to set up and €50 a month, no contract, VAT on top. A design-and-build firm that wants ads from February and monthly local pages for the areas it works in can look at Complete. Both are on the pricing page.