Landscaping in Mount Hawthorn, Perth WA

The front and back yard do different jobs, so they get different treatment.

The front is what neighbours and buyers see from the street. It needs a tidy lawn or low-water planting, a path that suits the house and a low wall or fence line that frames the garden. If you are getting ready to sell, this is where the money does the most work.

The back is where you live. It needs shade, somewhere to sit, a lawn that children and dogs can wear down and a spot for the clothesline. A bare sand yard after a build, or a garden that got away from you, can be turned into all of that in one project.

Side access matters more than most people expect. Where the path beside the house is only a gate wide, sand, pavers and limestone go in by barrow instead of machine. That means extra labour, and the quote shows it.

Limestone is the local stone for garden walls, edges and raised beds, and its warm colour sits well against an older bungalow frontage.

Before any wall goes up, the ground is prepared. The old turf and roots come out, the sand is cut and filled to level and the base is compacted firm. A sloping block that keeps washing sand onto the path usually needs a retaining wall with drainage behind it, so water has somewhere to go other than your paving.

Pavers lifting near a big tree usually point to roots and a thin base. The landscaper lifts the paving, deals with the roots that are pushing it up and relays it on a firm, deeper base. The cause is confirmed on site.

If a wall holds back much more than knee height of sand, expect the landscaper to raise whether a permit is needed. The local council makes that call.

A patchy lawn with retic that misses half the garden usually has two problems: sprinkler coverage and the soil under the turf.

Proper lawn installation starts with stripping the old grass, levelling the surface and mixing soil improver into the sand so it holds water longer. The retic is then adjusted so the sprinklers overlap and reach every corner. Turf goes down last and gets rolled so it knits to the soil.

Old bungalow lawns often sit under mature trees whose roots compete for water, and original retic lines tend to turn up when the turf comes off. With hot easterly summers and only two watering days a week, the lawn and plants need to be chosen for those conditions. Waterwise natives and tough groundcovers around the lawn cut the work further.

A good design keeps the upkeep small: a mow, a prune and a check on the sprinklers.

Low-voltage landscape lighting along a path, up a limestone wall or into a tree makes the garden usable on summer evenings.

If your back yard bakes in the afternoon, a roofed or shade-sailed area on the western side gives you somewhere to sit when the sun is lowest. Add a built-in bench and sink and it works as an alfresco kitchen.

Licensed specialists handle the regulated parts. An electrician connects lighting to mains power, and a licensed plumber or gasfitter does any water or gas work.

A written price sets out the scope, the materials and the stages of payment before the first shovel goes in. You can plan your budget around it.

On a Mount Hawthorn block with a gate-wide side path, barrow labour and sand removal should show as separate lines. That is often where one quote runs higher than another. Old turf removal, a compacted base, drainage behind a wall and retic repairs add cost too, and a line-by-line scope shows what each price buys.

Payments tied to stages of the work, rather than a large deposit up front, keep the job moving. Having design and build handled together means fewer handovers between separate trades, so the yard is less likely to sit half finished.

Mount Hawthorn is made up almost entirely of single-storey houses, mostly Interwar and Californian Bungalows from the 1920s and 1930s. Yards on blocks that old can carry mature trees, worn limestone edging or original retic that needs replacing, so limestone, simple lines and planting that does not swallow the verandah suit them.

Blocks that have been gardened for close to a century can hide old fence lines, footings and buried roots under the lawn, which the landscaper finds when the old turf comes up.

The suburb sits about four kilometres from the Perth CBD. On a compact lot near the Mt Hawthorn Town Centre, Braithwaite Park or Axford Park, side access and verge space decide how sand, pavers and plants arrive. On a verge with a lot of foot traffic, hard-wearing planting or mulch holds up better than soft groundcover.

Say how big the yard is, what stands there now and how the ground falls, then Request a Project Review.