Practical guidance on turf, paving, retaining walls and garden care for Melbourne properties — the questions we are asked most often on site, answered properly.
The best lawn is not simply the greenest option in a photograph. It is the one that suits how you use the space, how much maintenance you want to take on, the amount of sun the yard receives and how the site drains.
Read the guidePlants and mulch usually get chosen at the end of a landscaping job, after the walls, paving and turf are in. They deserve more thought than that. Planting decides how much privacy and shade a garden gives, how it looks in winter, and how much work it asks of you every year. Mulch decides whether the beds hold water through a Melbourne summer or bake.
Most commercial landscaping enquiries we receive are one or two lines long: "turf for a childcare centre", "garden beds at the front of the office", "ongoing maintenance for a block of units". That is a fine start, but it is not enough to price from, so the first site visit ends up being spent working out the basics.
The day we pack up is not the day the garden is finished. Turf takes four to six weeks to root in, plants take a season to settle, mulch sinks, and the irrigation settings we leave you with are a starting point until the weather has had its say.
New turf creates an immediate transformation, but the green surface is only the visible layer. Whether it becomes a lasting lawn depends on what happened before the first roll went down and on the first four to six weeks afterwards, while the roots establish.
Low maintenance does not mean covering the entire yard in one hard surface. It means designing the garden so routine work is predictable, easy to reach and in proportion to the time you actually want to spend outside.
A small backyard does not need miniature versions of every feature found in a large garden. It works better when a few functions are chosen deliberately and the space between them is kept clear.
For most Melbourne homes the best windows are spring, from roughly September to November, and early autumn, in March and April. The soil is warm enough for roots to grow, the worst heat is out of the way and rain does some of the watering for you. Turf roots grow best when the soil sits between about 14 and 25 degrees, which is why those two windows keep coming up.
Planning a landscaping project comes down to five decisions made in the right order: work out how the space has to function, deal with water and levels before anything is built on top of them, choose a small palette of materials, put the money into the parts that cannot be redone, and sequence the work from the ground up so nothing finished gets wrecked by the next stage. Do that, and even a project built over two or three years will end up as one garden rather than a set of patches.
Pavers and stepping stones both give you a clear route through a garden, but they solve different problems. Continuous paving is the better choice where the path is used every day, in all weather, by people carrying things. Spaced stepping stones are the better choice where traffic is lighter and you want the path to sit gently in lawn, gravel or planting rather than cut a hard line through it.
A retaining wall is used to hold back soil where ground levels change. It can create a usable lawn, protect a path, support a garden bed or help organise a sloping site. It should not be added purely as decoration without understanding what it needs to retain and where water will go.
A few bare patches do not always justify replacing an entire lawn. Equally, repeatedly patching a lawn with poor drainage, unsuitable soil or widespread weed problems can spend money without changing the result.
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