It is difficult to choose the right landscaper for your garden. In recent years, the number of landscaping companies has grown steadily in the United States, to over 100,000 in recent years.
A search on Google in your locality and its surroundings, will already greatly reduce this number, but you will still have a substantial list. In this article, we offer some ideas to help you choose the right landscaper:
Notoriety
Before you even start researching a landscaping company, there might be a name you know spontaneously. You’ve remembered this name at a trade show, with friends, on advertisements, vehicles …
You may have already seen gardens made by this company during your walks. The notoriety of a company is not in itself a main criterion for your choice, but it proves that this landscaper is an important player in your sector. It reassures you about the sustainability of the business and the fact that other people have trusted it before you.
This physical notoriety can be coupled today with a virtual notoriety. You will probably find it easier to trust a business that shows up on Google. Or even more to the one who is present and who participates on social networks. Notoriety has a reassuring and reassuring side to all these elements.
Choose your landscaper according to your work
For small garden work, a company with less than 3 employees may be sufficient, for a complete landscaping or restructuring of the garden, this will no doubt be insufficient. Creating a garden requires multiple skills, but also mobilizes a team permanently in your garden.
The specialized equipment required for landscaping work is often expensive and depreciable only by companies with significant human resources.
While fellow landscapers are extremely versatile people, knowing how to move from carpentry to landscaping masonry, beware of companies offering too many services with few staff.
Likewise, many landscapers are now swimming pool specialists, in fact this professional association may prove to be logical. But while there are some very good landscapers and pool specialists, not all of them have the perspective and the experience that this dual skill requires.
Design
The landscaping of a garden is also and above all a design story, although many technical considerations may come into play when choosing your landscaper.
This should correspond to your needs and if possible anticipate them and this in a contemporary garden style, from this year and not from thirty years ago.
There are many landscapers whose garden design work comes down to following your guidelines and coming up with very few new ideas. However, when you call on a landscaper worthy of the name, he must be a source of proposals to suggest the solutions best suited to your land and your budget, even if it is totally contrary to the initial idea.
Finally ask to see examples of garden design, it is important to visualize the projects that this company offers. The designer can be very good, but if you, the client, do not understand anything about the project he is proposing to you, you will probably go your way.
The Showroom
What interest for you that your landscaper has a Showroom or an exhibition garden?
There are 3 main ones.
The first is to visualize the concepts. You have chosen landscapers offering innovative technical ideas or solutions. They are by definition not widely used, the showroom will help you easily make your choice by confronting you with the chosen solution.
The second interest is summed up in this proverb: “It is at the foot of the wall that we see the mason”. As you walk through the exhibition gardens, you will be able to visualize the know-how of each landscaper, see their area of expertise, their style, etc. The more you know about the companies you want to solicit, the more easily you will place your trust , or your distrust.
Finally, when the quote is signed, the showroom will make it easy to choose the materials for your project on site. It will be safer for you to choose a paving placed in a situation in a garden, rather than on a sample behind a desk.
The price
Despite the previous criteria, there remains a determining factor in the choice of your landscaper, this is the last line of his estimate. It’s a reflex that we all have to go right to at the end to see the overall cost, but of course you have to dig deeper into the estimate.
The first thing is to see if the estimate is already detailed item by item. To understand a price, it is important to see what it is made up of and therefore how you will be able to define the quality / price ratio.
For an identical service such as a paved courtyard, for example, you will get different quotes. Even if the paving is identical, a landscaper may have included the replacement of all the concrete manholes by more expensive cast iron buffers, or the passage of sheaths not provided for by his competitor. The joints may be sand for one when it is polymer resin for the other.
Then you will make your choice based on your quality criteria.
Affinity
All of us have have an immediate good impression when you meet your landscaping artist. You know this impression we have of people, of those with whom we immediately know that a relationship will be created for many years to come.
Well, the same can happen with contractors, you know from the first meeting the flow has gone well and there is a very good chance that you will sign your garden project with him.
This is therefore a significant factor in choosing your landscaper, even if neither you nor I can explain it.
As we have seen, many parameters can guide you in your choice of a landscaper. There are also differences specific to each company such as technical specificities… which will influence you.