Landscaper in Newton Abbot,Ten Minutes From Our Yard

The town splits fairly neatly into three kinds of garden. Victorian and Edwardian terraces around Wolborough and Courtenay Park, with long narrow plots and side access barely wide enough for a barrow. Post-war and 1970s housing at Milber, Buckland and Highweek, where the plots are wider but the ground was levelled with whatever was to hand. And newer estate housing towards Bradley Barton and the Kingsteignton edge, handed over as a rectangle of turf on compacted subsoil.

Each one leads to a different job. On a terrace the work is largely logistics, getting the spoil out and the stone in without wrecking the neighbour's path. On the older estates it is usually levels and drainage. On a new build it is starting the garden from nothing.

The low ground through the middle of Newton Abbot sits on clay and old river silt, and water does not move through it quickly. Patios laid on a thin bed with no fall hold water against the house and green over within a couple of winters.

That is why the sub-base, the fall and where the water is going to go are settled before any slab is ordered. On the higher ground at Highweek and Ogwell the issue is more often slope, where a terrace and a low retaining wall turn an unusable bank into somewhere you can put a table.