Thirty years on the tools
Lord of the Lawns is Graham. If you ring the number, he answers it. If we build your garden, he is the one building it.
The beginning
He started at fifteen
Graham went into the building trade straight out of school and has been in it ever since. Building, painting inside and out, and plastering, which became the thing he was known for.
Three decades of that teaches you things that do not show up on a website. How ground behaves when it is wet. Why something that looks finished is not finished. What a corner cut in week one looks like in year five.
Gardens are a building job before they are a planting job. He came at it from the right end.
The move to gardens
Thirty years of plastering takes it out of you
Graham plastered for the best part of thirty years. It is skilled work and he was good at it, and it is also the kind of trade that asks a lot of a body over that sort of stretch.
About five years ago he started taking on grass cutting, expecting it to be something on the side. What he found was that he liked being outside, and that a garden gives you something a wall never does. You stand back at the end of a week and the whole shape of the place has changed.
The landscaping grew out of that, and it turned out the building years were the useful part. Levels, drainage, foundations and getting things properly square are the same problems outdoors as in.
He is enjoying this in the way he enjoyed plastering at seventeen, when he had just worked out he was good at it.
How he works
Six things he does not bend on
01.
Turn up when you said you would.
Life happens and jobs overrun. That is not the problem. The problem is being sat in all morning for somebody who never rings. If we are going to be late you will hear it from us first.
02.
Price it once and price it honestly.
The number on the quote is the number on the invoice. Nobody enjoys the conversation where the price has quietly gone up, least of all us. If something genuinely unexpected turns up in the ground, we stop, and you decide what happens next.
03.
Do the part nobody will ever see properly.
Nobody is going to lift your patio to check the sub base. Nobody is going to dig behind your wall to see whether the drainage went in. It gets done properly anyway, because that is the only part that decides whether any of it is still right in ten years.
04.
Leave it tidy every night.
You have to live there while we are working. Tools away, path clear, nothing left where the kids or the dog will find it. Ten minutes at the end of the day, every day.
05.
Treat the small jobs like the big ones.
One set of steps or a whole garden, somebody saved up for it either way. We would rather do a small job properly than a big one carelessly, and quite a lot of the big ones started out as small ones.
06.
If it is wrong, come back and put it right.
Everyone gets something wrong eventually. What separates people is what happens next. You will not get an explanation of why it is actually fine. You will get us back in the van.
The name
Lord of the Lawns
There is no story behind it. Graham is just good at names.
It made him laugh, it stuck, and nobody who hears it forgets it. Which, as far as he is concerned, is the entire job of a name.
If you were hoping for something more meaningful, so were we.
On site
Graham and Conor
Graham’s right hand is his son Conor. He does the graft, and he is learning the trade the way it has always been learned, by standing next to someone who knows it and doing the job with them.
It means there are two people in your garden who care how it turns out, rather than a crew passing through on the way to the next one.
Off site, the quotes and the invoices get done at the kitchen table. And the website you are reading was built by Graham’s eldest, Caleb, who set it up so that anything you send lands straight on Graham’s phone. No call centre, no inbox it sits in for a week.
Come and have a look at what we do
The best way to judge a landscaper is to look at the gardens they have built. Ours are on the Our Work page.