LANDSCAPE DESIGN SERVICES
We make it our business to help you understand the elements that make a great landscape design work
Landscape Concept Plans
Working with homeowners, architects, and builders, New Terrain Landscape Design creates Landscape Concept Plans that solve the tricky problems on a site. With our certified training and experience in Landscape Design and Horticulture, we create beautiful, tailor-made plans to suit your needs. With our focus on Australian contemporary garden design, whether you’re in the mountains, in the city or on the coast, our wide knowledge of native and exotic plants will ensure that you get the right plants to suit your climate and landscape style.
If you need a Landscape Concept Plan for personal use to improve your property or you need a plan to satisfy the requirements of your development application, our expertise will make sure you get the right plan every time.
We offer free quotes to let you know how much your plan might cost with plans starting as low as $450+GST.
What are your garden needs?
New Terrain can provide creative landscape designs and garden plans that can solve a number of common needs for homeowners: landscape plans for development applications for residential garden design, affordable landscape design, garden renovations, drought resistant garden designs, low maintenance garden designs, sustainable garden designs, small garden designs, Australian native garden designs, commercial landscape designs, front yard makeovers and backyard makeovers to name a few.
Our familiarity and experience working in contemporary Australian garden design as well as Australian heritage garden styles and traditional European garden styles means that we are familiar with the broad range of Australian native plants as well as exotic plants that are available to Australians.
Council D.A. / CDC /
Development Applications
When building or modifying your property, you may be required to supply a landscape design as part of the submission process for your Council D.A. or CDC development application. Each Council has its own Development Control Plan or DCP- rules for meeting the criteria of an approved landscape design can vary greatly from one Council to another. Some Councils have very basic guidelines that are easy to follow while others have a long list of requirements on things such as the size of the property, the slope, bushfire risks, setbacks, easements, ratios of hardscape to soft landscaping and even lists of specific plants and trees that are allowed and not allowed to be planted in a landscape. It all can be a bit overwhelming for someone who is just trying to get their project built.
New Terrain Landscape Design has experience creating landscape plans for Councils all over the Sydney region, Newcastle, Wollongong and the Blue Mountains. We custom tailor our designs to meet the specific requirements of your Council to help get your plan approved.
Do you know your Zone?
While each council has its own rules and regulations regarding general landscape site design requirements, some of those rules can change depending which Land Zone your site resides in. For example, depending on whether your property is situated in a Residential Zone, an Environmental Living Zone or an Industrial Zone, there can be wildly different landscape requirements that you’ll need to meet to get approval. Additional considerations such as slope constraints, bushfire ratings, deferred matters and easements can complicate things even further. Some people are surprised to discover that the properties across the street and sometimes even next door can be under a completely different set of guidelines!
New Terrain Landscape Design can help you navigate through the complicated and confusing regulations to create a custom plan that will get approved.
What kind of documentation do you need?
Many Councils require that your landscape plan is developed by a certified landscape designer or landscape architect. New Terrain meets those qualifications by having a qualified Landscape Designer and Horticulturalist on staff.
As part of your Landscape Concept Plan, we deliver professional, high quality PDFs of CAD drawings of your site. The information in these drawings include a landscape concept plan drawing, hardscape and softscape installation detail drawings and a list of site specifications. Also included are locations of all proposed plants and trees including a complete, detailed list of plant names, quantities and sizes which will satisfy the requirements of Council as well as the landscapers hired to do the landscape installation.
Some Councils, such as the Blue Mountains, also require an in-depth Site Assessment as part of the Landscape Plant. These Site Assessments may need to document existing site features such as on-site vegetation, invasive weeds, neighbouring plant species and the character of the street of your property. The need for this type of documentation and the level of detail required by Council is factored in to the cost of your individually tailored Landscape Plan.
The option to add a mood board with images of proposed plants and site materials to the documentation is also available.
Working with Natives
We love incorporating Australian native plants into our garden designs. Aside from exhibiting a wonderful array of colours and textures, they have a number of features that make them great to work with in a landscape design. While it’s a misconception that natives are plant-and-forget specimens, Australian native plants can be more readily adapted to the challenging soil and climate conditions of Australia than exotic species. Establishing an Australian native garden can focus on low water gardens / drought resistant gardens, encouraging local plant diversity and bushcare, and attracting and supporting Australian wildlife. Natives can also be used to bolster our fragile communities of native insects, flora and fauna.
Depending on where you live, Council may require some or all of the plants you intend to plant in your garden to be plants native to Australia. The huge variety and availability of gorgeous Australian natives now available at nurseries means that an Australian native garden doesn’t have to look like a dry bush garden anymore.
Contact us.
Contact us to let us know how we can help you.