Services
Red Earth provides a friendly service to meet your garden needs as well as those of the environment. Often working in historic and ancient landscapes, we use a blend of new techniques and traditional methods in our landscaping and maintenance.
How we work
By developing gardens over time, through maintenance programmes, we can support the natural habitat networks at work, on both micro and macro scales. These networks, in turn, enhance the health of perennial flower and shrub borders, native woodlands, wildflower banks, and lawns that form the building blocks of your outdoor space.
We also enjoy working transformationally, working to a design to renew a tired landscape, always with an eye to enhancing the existing environment while providing opportunities for new wildlife to move in.
This consideration for our environment is central to our design and build processes. Be it specifying habitat creation or the use of local stone for walls or terraces, or local untreated, resilient timber for creating beautiful wooden features.
We find working in this way is often more time and cost effective than deploying the more energy intensive landscaping techniques. It tends to be a more enjoyable and interesting build process for us, and our clients too.
Understanding that cost is often one of the main design limitations, creating a scheme that aligns with clients' expectations for both ambition and expense can be an enjoyable challenge. By employing techniques such as longer-term maintenance plans, using roundwood timber instead of sawn wood, using reclaimed materials, or incorporating softer landscaping techniques, it is possible to bring most visions to life.
Design
Red Earth offers an extensive design process: from creating and refining full landscaping drawings and details, to planting schemes and long term garden maintenance plans. Or, if you already have a designer and a plan, working collaboratively is very enjoyable for us too.
We have designed in historic settings as well as new, in small gardens through to large estates, as well as at the wider landscape scale . We work in formal or naturalised settings, creating forest gardens or natural swimming pools, rewilding the land or sensitively claiming it back from the wilderness. Most projects begin with an assessment and design phase, where we focus on the wildlife potential, the immediate needs and your long-term goals to help create the garden you envision.
Build
We prioritise working with natural materials to create the structure in your outdoor spaces, and in Devon we have a wonderful variety of stone and sustainably managed timber that can be used to this end.
Where possible, we choose the use of low energy materials or techniques, like building drystone or green oak sleeper walls to retain the ground, as opposed to energy intensive reinforced concrete or blockwork and render. On certain projects, materials can be sourced directly from the site by using a mobile mill to plank up trees, reclaiming useable second hand materials or excavation of onsite stone or aggregates already in the landscape.
Maintain
As well as maintaining gardens, we are often reclaiming them from bramble and jungle-like invasive plants. We like to bring a long term perspective of what a garden could become, and develop them through ongoing maintenance and plantings to achieve this. Our planting schemes can take in many perspectives: this might be habitat and species based, or for colour, form and habit, or for food production.
We were early adopters of battery powered garden tools, so we can maintain your grounds without the noise and pollution of fossil fuel tools.
We sometimes rescue and divide plants, and as a result we hold a reasonable stock of native shrubs and trees, as well as exotic garden shrubs and herbaceous plants that we can use to supplement existing planting schemes, or in creating new ones.