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Home improvement guides
Practical, reviewed advice for planning repairs and projects, choosing the right pro and knowing what to ask before you hire.
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494 guides
- Guide
Turf Laying guide
A quick note on the word first. In Britain this job is called turfing, or laying turf, and the rolls are turf. Sod is the American term for the same thing, and although British gardeners will understand it, no…
16 min read14 September 2026 - Guide
Artificial Turf guide
Artificial turf is sold on a simple promise — a green lawn with no mowing — and in a British garden it usually delivers that.
11 min read21 September 2026 - Guide
Garden Design guide
Garden design is the planting-led half of the job. Where a landscape design settles levels, structures and surfaces, a garden design settles what grows where: the shape of the beds, the succession through the year, how…
10 min read21 September 2026 - Guide
Garden Maintenance guide
Garden maintenance is the standing arrangement rather than the one-off job: someone comes at an agreed interval and keeps the garden in the condition you have agreed, instead of being called when it has got away from…
8 min read21 September 2026 - Guide
Tree Service guide
A tree service is the firm you call when a tree needs something done to it and a ladder is not the answer: an inspection before a decision, crown work from a rope or a platform, a dismantle where there is no room to…
10 min read21 September 2026 - Guide
Tree Removal guide
Felling a tree in a British garden is a planning question before it is a practical one. A mature tree may be covered by a Tree Preservation Order, which prohibits cutting it down, topping, lopping, uprooting, wilful…
13 min read14 September 2026 - Guide
Tree Trimming guide
Tree trimming in Britain covers everything from lifting a crown off a garage roof to reducing a lime that has outgrown a front garden, cutting back a boundary hedge and taking deadwood out of a mature oak.
13 min read14 September 2026 - Guide
Tree Surgeons guide
Tree surgeon is not a protected title in the United Kingdom, and there is no register to look somebody up on. What does exist is a body of British Standards describing how tree work should be specified and carried out,…
11 min read21 September 2026 - Guide
Shrub & Hedge Trimming guide
Hedge and shrub trimming is the one piece of routine garden work that regularly turns into a legal question, because a hedge is usually on a boundary and a boundary has two owners.
8 min read21 September 2026 - Guide
Irrigation guide
Irrigation is a smaller, quieter installation in Britain than in hotter countries, and it is usually installed for particular parts of a garden rather than for the whole of it: raised beds and a vegetable plot, a…
13 min read14 September 2026 - Guide
Sprinkler Systems guide
A sprinkler system is the buried, zoned version of garden watering: pipe trenched under the lawn, pop-up heads set flush so a mower passes over them, solenoid valves grouped into zones, and a controller that runs each…
10 min read21 September 2026 - Guide
Yard Drainage guide
Garden drainage is the job people put off because the symptom is seasonal. A lawn that squelches from November to March, a corner that never dries, a path with a permanent green film, a raised bed that drowns everything…
12 min read21 September 2026
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