Landscaping Editing and Proofreading Services

The planting goes in and it looks wonderful. Everyone is pleased, the client pays, and the contractor leaves. Eleven months later a third of it is dead, because nobody watered it through a dry August — not out of negligence, but because the specification said the plants would be maintained during the establishment period without saying who, how often, or with how much water.

We edit what landscape contractors and designers produce — planting and maintenance specifications, establishment period requirements and responsibilities, soft landscape schedules and plant specifications, watering and irrigation requirements, defects and replacement provisions, hard landscape specifications and tolerances, ground preparation and topsoil documentation, tree planting and protection documentation, handover and aftercare guidance for clients, seasonal maintenance schedules, and quotations and their exclusions. Our editors work on what happens after the contractor leaves.

The establishment and maintenance specification is what determines whether a scheme survives its first year, and its failure is describing an obligation without an owner or a measure. "Plants to be maintained until established" is a sentence everyone signs and nobody performs. We work through these so the establishment period is defined with a start and an end date rather than a duration from an unstated point, since practical completion, planting completion and handover are three different days; so watering is specified as a volume, a frequency and a trigger — so many litres per plant, at what interval, and the weather condition that changes it — because a plant needs water on the terms plants need water and not on the terms a schedule was drafted; so responsibility is allocated by name and role for each task, with what happens when the client's own gardener takes over mid-period; so the failure and replacement provision states what counts as a failure, who judges it, when the assessment happens and who pays, given that a replacement clause without a date is a clause nobody invokes; so seasonal tasks are given with the month rather than the season, as "spring" is a six-week argument; and so what will actually happen if the specification is not followed is stated plainly, because the client deciding to save money on watering should know what they are buying. Specifications written this way produce schemes that are alive in year two.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including specifications, schedules and client information. We are editors rather than horticulturalists or landscape architects, and we offer no view on plant selection, maintenance regimes or establishment. What we can do is give every obligation an owner, a measure and a date.