Frequently asked questions (FAQ)  

Fine gardening is a comprehensive practice of targeted horticultural care with the goal of building happy, healthy, and beautiful gardens. It is a specialized approach to landscape management that requires a high level of horticultural awareness, taking the needs of each plant and garden community into consideration and prioritizing ecological health. This service is customized to address the unique nature of each individual landscape.

For more on fine gardening, check out the video Fine Gardening: Demystified on our YouTube channel.

Landscape maintenance involves all the big moves you make to keep your landscape clean and navigable—mowing the lawn, raking leaves, pulling weeds, and shoveling snow. Fine gardening is much more detail oriented, focusing on the horticultural and ecological health and presentation of your landscape. This includes tasks like pruning trees and shrubs, deadheading and dividing perennials, transplanting, soil testing and amending, adding seasonal decor, and managing hardscapes.

No. Lawn care, including mowing and health care practices, is a unique, highly skilled service that The Garden Continuum does not specialize in. While we do install lawns as part of our Design/Build projects, we do not offer regular care. We’re lucky to work with a number of exceptional local lawn care service partners to provide any lawn maintenance and health care services our clients need. 

For great partners in Massachusetts, go to the MLP website and click Find a Professional. If you’re from out of state, you can look up providers at NALP or on your state’s Association of Landscape Professionals website.

Simply put, a landscape is something you look at, while a Life-Scape is something you live in. Life-Scaping is working with nature to build a healthy, organized, and beautiful outdoor environment that will grow and evolve as the needs and desires of you and your family change over time.

Learn more by watching the video A Life‑Scape^TM Defined.

We offer a complimentary Landscape Discovery Session (LDS) to anyone in our service area who wants to discuss how to best approach their project. During this brief, complimentary phone call, you can talk to an expert about the broad strokes of your project, including budget, timing, and feasibility. 

If we agree that we are a good working fit to work together, we will recommend that you hire our Creative Director to conduct an On-Site Landscape Assessment (OLA) in order to drill down into the details of your project opportunities.

The OLA is an in-depth meeting that requires you to complete some advanced preparation to set the stage for this discussion. This meeting will last anywhere from one to two hours. The goal is to leave you with a sense of project clarity to help you make the best decisions for how to proceed with your project.

If you're ready, click here get started working with TGC.

TGC has adopted a hyper-local service model that allows us to limit the time and resources used to travel to and from our vendors, suppliers, clients and shop location. We actively serve: Medfield, Sherborn, Dover, Walpole, Millis, Medway, Westwood, Needham, South Natick, and Norfolk. We do make exceptions to work outside our service area when the project is specifically aligned to our Life-Scape model and we are able to fit the travel into our calendar.

After we’ve completed your OLA and clarified the scope of your project, you may hire us to do a design. We will go through a rigorous process with our specialists to come up with an estimate before sending you a formal proposal. Once that proposal is approved, construction can begin. 

Alternatively, if it’s  immediately evident what the scope of work will be, we can submit a proposal for simple plant additions, garden edits, a landscape rescue, or small hardscape project right away.

TGC specializes in conservation land management and project development. If you’d like to talk to an expert about your conservation project, click here to schedule a complimentary Landscape Discovery Session.

Our fine gardening services range from $4,500-$45,000/year. Cost comes down to a number of factors, including the size of your land and the complexity of the landscape. However, you are in complete control of how much you spend. We can take the complexity of caring for a diverse landscape off of your plate so you can do the gardening work that you enjoy most. Or leave the work to us and just enjoy your Life-Scape.

Landscape design can be as simple as a design narrative included in an installation estimate to a full blown computer-aided design (CAD) plan. Designs range from $1,800-$9,500 (a one time fee) depending on the amount of land being designed, the complexity of the hardscape features, and the diversity of the horticultural features.

No. There’s a great deal of time and energy involved in coming up with a solution for any land development project. Each step in the process comes with its own set of customized site visits and client interactions with any number of our in-house specialists. For this reason, our design and installation fees are separate.

Small projects tend to cost between $5,000-$15,000. Mid-range projects can be anywhere in the 5-figure range. Full master plans, including hardscape, driveways, and grade changes, will usually reach 6-figures when it’s all said and done. 

The beautiful thing about starting with a design is that you’ll know what your project will cost before the shovel hits the ground. No surprises. When you pay for planning, you can more easily decide and budget around what’s important to start with and what can be tackled in a later phase.