Soft landscaping is the more changeable, living part of your garden landscape. The plants, mulch, soil, lawn, trees, shrub, flowers and hanging baskets, these all make up the soft landscaping of your garden. The soft landscaping element in the garden seems to be the area where most people become confused, scared or overwhelmed by deciding how they want their entire garden planting/soft landscaping to look. That’s what we are here for. With Green Onion Landscaping’s friendly, professional help and years of experience, we will help you make the right design and planting choices for your newly soft landscaped garden.

Plants are the decorative materials that help to colour, style and bring aromas into your garden borders. They also serve to infill the shaped borders, to create privacy and/or shelter, and to flesh out the borders, giving them bulk or mass. To a degree, certain types of border patterns/styles go with certain styles of house. Formal with classic, rambly with cottage and so on. Then there are various national styles of pattern: we can pick out Japanese or Spanish for example. It is the selection of plants that we choose that will often define your garden’s style more than any other element.

What is soft landscaping/planting design?
Soft landscaping design or planting is to do with logic, stability, style and of course cost. The soft landscaping garden design process is a sequential step-by-step reasoning of where your garden is, who you and yours are, and what styles you like or don’t like and then making all of these elements fit together within your already formed garden design space. It’s our job to find out what style of garden you’d like and what type of gardener you are. Green Onion Landscaping will discuss the design, style and the overall shape that you’d like to create in your new garden. We use our expertise to help you choose suitably shaped borders, raised beds, structures, trees, shrubs, flowers, plants that will create the style/look of garden you wish to achieve.

Initial client contact
Clients often contact Green Onion Landscaping by ‘phone or e-mail. We arrange to visit their garden, this appointment is confirmed in an e-mail. Our fees for the consultation are explained and have usually already been read on this page on our website. We always charge an initial site visit fee which starts at *£150.00 (see above).
Our visit
Our antenna comes out as we approach a new site. We are looking at everything from the natural vegetation or what is growing in gardens nearby, this gives us a feel for the place. Often when we visit clients we know very little about them, although they might have told us all about their garden problem which we are there to solve. However, the clients themselves are as important as the garden. We need to see your house, its style and period and it’s materials, but the clients’ are something else again. We feel it’s really helpful to see inside our clients’ houses. This gives us a real insight into what you like and do not like. We can pick up on your style by seeing how you live, what type of decor you have or how you dress. It’s also really important for us to find out who makes the decisions, or who has an idea of what to expect.
Initial reaction
Personally we tend to talk a lot, think out loud. Our clients are paying for our ideas, so we say exactly what occurs to us as we view your garden space. We may even mumble something about thinking aloud. This way we spark a reaction from you and a conversation of ideas begins. We want to know everything – What you do want, and what you don’t want in your garden. We always get excited about new soft landscaping designs and planting plans. We hope our energy enthuses our clients as we walk around their garden. We take photographs of everything in its current state. These photographs are used to look at again and again whilst we’re thinking about and designing your garden planting, which, believe it or not, will be frequently. 
Getting the facts down
We measure up the site there and then, with the client’s agreement, if it is more complicated – with varying levels, for instance then further visits may be necessary. We like to sit down and envisage the new garden whilst we’re in the old garden. We make lots of notes (mental notes and actual written notes). As soon as we’re back to our van we fill in our Client Brief Form. The briefing form contains everything we need to know about you and your garden. For instance name, address, number in family, your interests, pets and numbers, type of house, style of decor, what the client wants, location, local planting seen from van, soil, the orientation of the site, drainage, building materials, boundaries, colour schemes, style of planting. We then sketch out the current garden shape. While driving home our minds flurry with ideas. We chat through our initial thoughts and make suggestions to one another, then we continue thinking whilst we drive back to our office. Once we’re in the office we both jot down our thoughts, in fact, everything we’ve just chatted about and imagined, then we quickly sketch a few ideas we’ve had. This process will continue for a few days until we are happy  with the design ideas and proposed plants. All of this information will be used to create your garden planting scheme and soft landscaping design. We will not give you the names of all the shrubs and plants we’ve chosen. If you’d like these there would be a charge.

The shape of the areas to be planted
The shapes we will create make up the pattern and flow of your garden, they affect the overall effect of the garden planting. For instance, the shapes in a formal and balanced garden pattern will be strict and regular, creating a classic, symmetrical layout. A collection of shapes like these would be suited to a Georgian or colonial-style house garden and therefore the planting would follow the design of the shapes. Nowadays, we tend to lead less strict lives and the garden design of our living spaces do tend to reflect this. This means that when Green Onion Landscaping design gardens today, while the shapes we evolve may be regular, they can be planted out in such a way as to create an asymmetrical layout. Regular doesn’t mean straight by the way. Curves can be geometric or flowing too. Curves should still employ geometry in their conception rather than be free-shaped wiggles. This may be our personal preference but there are practical reasons for this too, paramount among them being garden maintenance and ease of construction, depending upon the materials they are made of. The shape of your garden borders, lawns or flower beds is going to dictate to some extent the look of your garden. Here are some contemporary garden borders we designed, built and planted out for a client of ours in Whinney Hill, Stockton on Tees, Teesside.

Envisaging your new garden design
We will provide a hand-drawn rough sketch of your garden planting/soft landscaping. Green Onion Landscaping will also provide you with samples of edging stones or paving. Before your soft landscaping begins any shaped areas will be sprayed on to the ground where we are working. This will help you visualise your new garden/borders or raised beds shape.

While there is no one single method of how to balance hard landscaping and soft landscaping, harmony based on other outside influences will determine how we approach your garden planting scheme and planting design. Whether you’d like your soft planting to be traditional, contemporary, natural, subtle or make a statement, it’s important that you have a skilled team with the knowledge to create a fantastic planting scheme that will complement the surrounding hard landscaping of your garden.

Our experience
Green Onion Landscaping’s friendly, experienced team of skilled horticulturists and soft landscapers have worked on a large number of garden planting schemes from formal to informal, intensive to extensive, traditional to the unusual and contemporary.  With the benefit of Green Onion Landscaping’s 28 plus years of horticultural and soft landscaping experience, our clients can be sure they will get a first-class planting scheme with top quality plants that will thrive for years to come in a garden that is beautifully well designed.

How is Green Onion Landscaping so knowledgable?
Apart from the fact that we’ve been designing and creating soft landscapes for over 30 years, it is also an absolute fact that each member of the Green Onion Landscaping team love plants, adore the garden design and absolutely are in their element when designing and creating gardens. Green Onion Landscaping’s team spend many hours of their own time researching garden designs, plants, trees and shrubs.

Our landscaping team regularly visit garden design and flower shows around the country. Lots of valuable information is gained by us doing this. We are able to chat with other soft and hard landscaping experts and horticulturists. We swap ideas and learn about new trends. We all share a love for information on plants and garden design ideas. Some of the design and horticultural experts we meet are famous, which is always exciting for us. We all love our jobs and that shows in our work. It’s as simple as that.

Our committed landscaping team attend flower shows because it’s a passion and we enjoy it. It keeps us up to date so that we can provide all of our clients with the latest garden design advice and trends, as well as provide you with the newest shrubs, trees or flowers available to us.

Let Green Onion Landscaping bring your garden back to life
We are extremely confident in designing and creating small or large gardens. We have an excellent reputation for our soft landscaping design and installation work. We are extremely proud of all the gardens we have designed, created and planted from scratch in the North East. Let Green Onion Landscaping make your garden beautiful! You won’t regret it.

Once you’ve decided to proceed with your soft landscaping
We will visit plant nurseries to select the best, top quality specimen plants and shrubs for your soft garden landscaping project. This takes up a considerable amount of our time. We will choose plants, trees, shrubs and flowers which are the best specimens suited to your garden’s conditions. Our soft landscaping experts will choose plants and shrubs which will produce the desired style and design effect you would like in your new garden landscape. Whether that be a country garden, a traditional design, contemporary garden design, Japanese style garden or a garden which is fun and funky. Once all aspects of the plant design are agreed a quotation will be e-mailed to you. All plants will all be agreed with you before any planting is carried out.

Every client will be expected to read our Terms and Conditions and to sign a copy of their quotation to return to us. Your signed quotation acts as a legal contract/agreement between you and Green Onion Landscaping. We will not proceed with any landscaping work without a signed contract. 

Added extras
Green Onion Landscaping also sells enchanting large, ready-made, pre-planted Hanging Baskets.  Each of our hanging baskets is 16 inches and £45. We lovingly create beautiful, vibrant,  large mixed flower Winter and Summer hanging baskets at £45 each