How to Become a Landscape Gardener

Landscape gardening is the decoration of land, as by planting trees and shrubs and designing gardens. "Landscape gardening" is used especially to refer to residential landscaping work.

Typically as a landscape gardener, things you may do involve:

• Liaising with clients about garden designs,
• Understanding the client’s needs
• Creating sketches of the clients vision
• Ensuring your sketches can come in on budget
• Calculating costs for labour, materials etc
• Submitting estimates for clients
• Ordering items for the garden such as furniture
• Cultivating the turf and seeding if necessary
• Constructing fences, walls, decking and laying pavement etc
• Cultivating the turf and seeding if necessary
• Planting plants and other features as required e.g. water features

Once completing a project you would advice the client on how to maintain the garden or more commonly offer your services on an ongoing basis and agree to a maintenance contract.

Unlike many professions no formal qualifications are needed to become a landscape gardener but it is advisable you have a certain level of skill, experience and horticultural knowledge.

Qualifications in Horticulture can be helpful when proving your skills and knowledge. There are numerous courses in landscape designing, as well as gardening courses. Some examples of these are:

• Inchbald School of design – offer courses in garden design which are made especially to your specification and can last from three years to three months.
• The English Gardening School – offers a wide variety of short courses

There are numerous benefits to freelancing, for example the freedom and flexibility to work for as many different types of client as you like as well as the obvious benefit of increasing your take home pay. In fact our freelancer take home pay calculator shows you how much you can expect to take home as a freelancer.

Having made the decision to give it a go, whether full or part time and whether to set up as a sole trader or limited company, you’re going to need a wide range of tax and accountancy advice and support in the early days when setting up as a freelancer.

The most daunting thing about going freelancing for most people is the thought of having to engage with an accountant. At first glance it’s easy, you go down to your local high street accountant who quotes you anything from £250 - £600 plus VAT to do your end of year accounts for you.

This sounds great, however what happens if you want to speak to your accountant for advice throughout the year on things like:

• Expenses
• Tax allowances
• Take home pay
• How much you should put aside for your tax bill
• Should you register for the Flat Rate VAT scheme
• Would going limited be beneficial
• Can I do work other than copywriting through my business
• If you have a life plan and wish to go travelling what’s the most tax efficient way to run your business.

Each time you pick up the phone it is likely you will get charged, in fact every time your accountant sends you a letter you may charged and you may even get charged if you call to query your invoice! So by the end of the year you could easily be looking at a bill of over £1,000. 

Easy Accountancy charge a fixed fee of only £30 VAT a month.

We don’t want our clients to be scared to contact us and potentially lose out on valuable tax saving advice, that's why we only charge a fixed fee of £30 VAT a month. It’s important when you first start out freelancing that you set your business up in the best way possible. As a start up you’ll probably have loads of questions and will really appreciate the fact you can call your accountant as many times as you like without the fear of racking up large bills. 

You may also be interested in:

• How to Become a Builder

• How to Become a Carpenter

• How to Become a Plumber

• How to Become a Chef