Kensington and Chelsea

Smart Landscapes is a local company that specialises in looking after London garden squares, and developing the residents’ appreciation of their garden hand in hand with keeping all parts of the garden in good shape, paths, facilities, trees, flowers and turf.

In London square gardens, the vision is predominantly for them to be family spaces, beautiful places where residents relax, play and exercise outdoors. Beyond the regular trimming and feeding, fixing and mending of items, there the feeling of community that makes these spaces such dynamic gardens.

The team of outstanding skilled punctual staff at Smart Landscapes maintain each square garden on a threshold basis of 4 visits per week. Such a frequency - 4 visits per week - is what makes the gardens maintained by Smart Landscapes unique, it is what makes the gardens loved and the people love their gardens. It is the intangible asset invested in all Smart Landscapes.

Beyond all the skills of the horticulturalist, arboriculturalist, landscape architect, hydrological engineer, health and safety inspector, heritage conservationist, naturalist, valid and needed as these are at Smart landscapes, what is necessary in our modern metropolitan circumstances is the love and sensitivity of a regular hands on gardener.

For the enlightened stewardship of the gardens of our time is lacking not in knowledge but in sensitivity. This is in short a lack of love, and the flaw lies in the lack of intimacy inherent in the business model of a standard weekly contract gardening regime which does not include love per square metre in its calculations.

Conserving the assets of the past and introducing new features desirable to the new garden uses arises naturally out of familiarity with the site and the residents, and can only be developed effectively on site loving attention to detail. By observation, and by informed trial and error in conjunction with the garden committee, and with some considerable imagination and daring to break bad habits or by just letting them be naturally overtaken by better ones, Smart Landscapes stewards the innate brilliance of each garden and allows it to manifest sometimes slowly sometimes quickly depending on the circumstances through a continuous process of loving attention to the ground itself and an attention to the expectations of the space itself by the people who enjoy it.

Finding am inventive long term solution for the wide range of modern garden uses; for the tree climbers, dog walker, the toddlers and small kids party, the quiet set , the outdoor diners, adolescents, serious exercisers, tennis players, ornithologists, young adults and senior citizens, wedding parties and fireworks fanciers, is central to the keeping of a good garden here and the chief delight of the team at Smart Landscapes.