Landscaping in Kildare.

A lot of the work in Kildare is the back garden of a house on one of the estates built from the nineties on in Naas, Newbridge, Maynooth, Celbridge, Leixlip, Kildare town, Athy, Clane, Sallins or Kilcock. These gardens are bigger than most in suburban Dublin, but they were often finished in a hurry when the houses were sold. The usual story is a thin layer of topsoil spread over compacted subsoil, with builder's rubble, bits of block and plastic buried a spade's depth down, and a lawn seeded on top.

Laying new turf over the same ground gives you the same lawn again within a couple of years. The fix is to break up the compacted layer, take out the rubble, bring in topsoil where it is short and set the levels so water has somewhere to go.

Where water sits across the whole lawn, the answer is usually to improve the top layer: loosen the compacted ground, work in grit and organic matter, and lay the new topsoil on top so the roots have a layer that drains. Where water collects in one low corner or along a fence line, a French drain takes it away: a trench with a perforated pipe in clean stone, running to a point where it can go.

That point is the hard part on clay. A soakaway only works if the ground below can take the water, and heavy Kildare clay often cannot, so we dig a test hole and fill it before we promise one. Hard surfaces get their falls set at the base so paths and steps shed water away from the house and into a bed or a drain rather than onto the lawn.

Open ground and few mature trees on the newer estates mean wind crosses the gardens with little to slow it. A shelter hedge on the exposed side, planted at the right spacing and set for the size it will reach, does more for the rest of the garden than any amount of tender planting.

Limestone clay is on the alkaline side, so plants that want acid soil, such as rhododendron, azalea and camellia, tend to struggle unless they are in a raised bed or a pot with the right compost. The planting plan sticks to shrubs, perennials and hedging that are happy on Kildare clay. On peaty ground in the west the list changes, and the plan says so.

We cover the north of the county around Maynooth, Leixlip, Celbridge and Kilcock, the middle around Naas, Sallins, Clane, Newbridge and Kildare town, and the south down to Athy, along with the villages and rural houses between them. Topsoil, turf, plants and stone are supplied and delivered, and the skip and licensed waste removal are part of the price you see.