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“Garden clearance” covers a wide range of work, and most of the disagreements about it come from two people using the phrase to mean different amounts. It is worth being specific.
What Is Normally Included
- Cutting down and removing overgrown vegetation, brambles, nettles and scrub
- Cutting back or removing self-seeded saplings
- Strimming and cutting rough grass down to a manageable height
- Clearing ivy and other climbers off fences, sheds and the ground
- Cutting back overgrown shrubs, or removing them where agreed
- Removing the green waste generated by all of the above
- Raking through and leaving the ground tidy
What Is Usually Quoted Separately
Not because it cannot be done — most of it we do — but because it is different work with different equipment, and lumping it in makes a quotation meaningless:
- Tree work. Anything needing a climber or sectional dismantling is tree surgery, not clearance
- Stump grinding. A separate machine with its own access requirement
- Bamboo. Cutting the canes is clearance; removing the rhizome system is an excavation
- Hard landscaping removal — slabs, concrete, old bases, sheds, greenhouses
- Household and building waste. A different waste stream with different disposal costs. It gets taken away, but it is priced separately
- Digging out established root systems, as opposed to cutting growth down
- Turfing, planting and landscaping afterwards
The Two Things Worth Agreeing Before the Day
What is staying
This is the one that causes problems. In a garden that has been left for years, the difference between an overgrown shrub worth keeping and scrub to be removed is a judgement, and it should be yours rather than ours. Walk it beforehand and mark anything that stays — tape, canes, anything visible. What is not marked and not discussed is at risk of being treated as clearance.
How far down
Clearance runs on a scale, and the price follows it:
- Cut down and tidy — everything cut back, waste removed, roots left in the ground
- Cleared to soil — growth removed and the surface cleared, ready to be worked
- Cleared and cultivated — roots grubbed out, the ground turned over and levelled, ready for turf or planting
Most people picturing a clearance have the third in mind and most quotations describe the first, which is worth checking when comparing two prices.
What Tends to Turn Up
Neglected gardens routinely contain things nobody knew about, and it is normal rather than exceptional: buried rubble and old hardcore, a path or a patio under the growth, fence panels that have rotted out, dumped household items, and occasionally a well, a soakaway or an old pond.
None of it is a problem, but some of it changes the price, so a quotation given from photographs of long grass carries an honest caveat about what is underneath it.
Wildlife
An overgrown garden is habitat, and clearing it is not a neutral act. Nesting birds are protected from roughly March to August, and hedgehogs and other animals shelter in exactly the piles of material a clearance removes. Growth is checked before it is cut, and where there is an active nest that section waits.
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Ask Us About Your Own Garden
Send photographs of the whole garden rather than the worst corner, and tell us what you want to keep. Those two things make a clearance quotation accurate.
Tell us what needs doing across Hertfordshire and we will quote for the work. Call 07388 094829, message us on WhatsApp or use the form below.