DIY Meets Professional: Some Landscaping Design Companies Offer the Best of Both Worlds

You might think hiring a landscape designer is an all-or-nothing proposition. You tell them what you want and watch as your yard becomes the garden, lawn, or oasis of your dreams. But what if you enjoy gardening, and want to get your hands dirty? What if you’ve sketched out plans or purchased the materials, and just need help getting started?

DIY lawn care and landscaping is popular for a reason. For gardening aficionados, it’s soothing to water, trim, and weed, and fulfilling to see something you planted grow. But for amateur gardeners, certain tasks are simply too complicated or time-intensive to take on by yourself. Maybe you need professional help to ensure that stepping stones and retaining walls are installed properly to handle erosion. Maybe you’ve never worked with a certain plant before. Whatever the case, you can find a landscaping design company to help you out without sacrificing the do-it-yourself element.

The staff at a landscape design company bring a variety of skills to the table. They’re trained in architectural design to come up with harmonious, attractive, and functional plant arrangements and hardscape structures for a given property. They may have expert experience and knowledge related to trees and plants that are native to your area, or may specialize in keeping non-native plants alive in your location. Maybe they also provide lawn and tree services to keep your property looking neat and orderly. In many cases, you can hire a landscape designer to function in anywhere from one to all of these capacities.

Scenarios in which you might want to maintain a DIY element in a landscaping design and installation project include:

You’re an avid gardener, but need a professional to design an aesthetically pleasing arrangement of plants, trees, and shrubs for you to plant and maintain.

You’ve personally designed your desired landscape layout in rough or complete form, down to what plants you want and where each footpath will go. However, you don’t have any gardening experience and want to ensure your plants are going to survive long-term.

You want to add a patio, outdoor kitchen, or landscape lighting to the garden or yard you have already begun working on.

You truly want to construct and plant everything yourself, but need advice and guidance on what to purchase and how to complete the job for best results.

If you choose to go the partial or total DIY route to complete your landscaping, it’s still a good idea to solicit and listen to advice from the pros. After all, landscape architects, garden designers, and lawn care professionals plant trees and flowers and install patios for a living. Their experience can be extremely valuable to you as you create a plan of action for your own project. While working on a garden or backyard landscape can be fun and satisfying initially, it can become frustrating quickly if you have to redo work that was done incorrectly or watch your new plants die because you missed some crucial element in their care. Unless you yourself are a trained botanist, arborist, landscape architect, or other expert in the field, you can always benefit from asking for help.