A contemporary country garden in early spring: a still reflecting rill runs between beds of emerging perennials toward a low stone house.

The same garden in high summer: the rill flanked by billowing perennials and grasses in flower.

The same garden in late autumn: bronze seedheads and tawny grasses in low golden light.

The same garden in midwinter: skeletal seedheads under hoar frost and bare birch trunks.

A garden is never finished.

Landscape design and build for private gardens, estates
and grounds across the South of England.

Wrenfield House, Hampshire Spring

One garden, four seasons — scroll

01 Studio

We work in the slowest medium there is. Stone sets in a season. Yew takes fifteen years. A beech avenue is a gift to someone you will never meet.

Alder & Vale is a landscape design and build studio working on private gardens, estates and grounds. We draw, we build and we stay — because a garden signed off is a garden barely begun.

Founded: 2009
Gardens a year: 12
Longest client: 16 yrs

02 Approach

Designed, built and tended by one studio.

Most landscapes pass through three sets of hands and lose something at every join. We keep the whole of it — survey, drawing, construction, planting and the long tending afterwards — inside one studio, with our own teams on site.

Dry-laid limestone wall meeting silver-green ornamental grasses.

Overhead view of a contemporary garden reading as geometry: clipped yew, a dark reflecting pool and bands of meadow grass.

Design

Survey, concept, levels and planting, drawn in-house. We specify nothing we could not build ourselves.

Selected gardens

A mature perennial planting scheme in full late-summer performance.

Build

Our own landscape teams set out, cut and lay every project. No subcontracted guesswork, no drawings handed to strangers.

How we build

A garden under construction: setting-out lines, batter boards and a half-built dry-laid stone retaining wall.

Steward

Two visits a year, indefinitely. We edit, thin and replant as the garden decides what it wants to be.

Talk to the studio

An elevated evening view across an estate landscape of clipped yew and meadow grass.

03 Selected gardens

Twelve a year. No more.

A restored walled kitchen garden with espaliered fruit trees, oak raised beds and a glasshouse.

Wrenfield House

Hampshire · 2024 · 4 acres

A Georgian walled garden brought back into production, with a new glasshouse on the original footings.

A woodland garden with a riven stone path curving between mature oaks, ferns and hellebores.

Fernhurst Wood

West Sussex · 2022 · 11 acres

Eleven acres of neglected woodland, opened up over three winters. We took out more than we put in.

A clifftop coastal garden with windswept silver-blue grasses, a slate retaining wall and the Atlantic beyond.

Porthlow

Cornwall · 2023 · 1.2 acres

Everything here is chosen for salt and wind. The planting is low, silver and entirely unbothered.

A natural swimming pool terrace at dusk, dark still water lined in stone with a lit timber pool house.

The Long Water

Oxfordshire · 2025 · 2.5 acres

A natural pool cut into a slope, filtered by reed bed. It reads as though the water was there first.

04 Process

Four stages. Several years.

01
Survey & brief

We walk the ground in as many seasons as you will give us before we draw a line. Soil, water, light, wind, and the view you did not know you had.
4–12 weeks
02
Design

Concept, masterplan, levels, drainage, planting. Drawn in-house, tested in model and pegged out full size on site before anything is cut.
12–20 weeks
03
Build

Our own teams. Setting out, hard landscape, water, irrigation and planting — in the right order, in the right weather, with the drawings in hand.
12–30 weeks
04
Stewardship

Two visits a year, indefinitely. The garden you signed off is not the garden you will have, and that is the entire point of it.
Indefinite