Gardeners in Salcombe & the South Hams Coast

We work in Salcombe and across the South Hams coast, on gardens that all share one very particular problem: the wind comes off the sea and it carries salt.

What salt wind does to a garden

Anything soft on the seaward side gets scorched brown, often overnight after a blow, and people assume it is disease. It is usually just salt burn. It shapes what you can plant, where hedges go, and how they need cutting.

The plants that shrug it off are the ones you already see holding the line along this coast: griselinia, escallonia, euonymus, olearia, tamarisk, hebe, sea buckthorn and elaeagnus. Fight it with something soft and you will keep replacing it.

A hedge we replaced here

On this Salcombe job the boundary hedge had thinned out and gone bare at the base, which is what happens when an exposed hedge is left to get leggy: the wind gets underneath, and the shelter it was planted to give stops working.

We took it out completely, cleared the ground properly rather than planting into old roots and exhausted soil, and replanted with stock suited to the position. A new hedge on a coastal boundary needs watering through its first summer, which sounds obvious and is the single most common reason replacements fail.

Hedges on the coast are cut differently

An exposed hedge wants to be slightly wider at the base than the top, so light reaches the bottom and it stays furnished all the way down instead of going bare and letting the wind through. It also wants cutting little and often rather than hard once every few years, because a hard cut into old wood on a salt-blasted hedge does not always come back.

What else we do in Salcombe and the South Hams

Second home and holiday let maintenance, which is a lot of what we do along this coast: keeping a garden presentable between visits and lettings, with photos sent over so you can see it without driving down. Also regular maintenance, clearance, fencing (slatted rather than solid on exposed boundaries, so the wind passes through), decking, planting and water features.

Get a price

Ring 01803 900096. Salcombe and Kingsbridge are a run out from Paignton for us, so for one-off work we will usually try to line it up with other jobs in the area, and we will tell you straight if we cannot look after you properly from here.

Second homes and holiday lets

A lot of what we do along this coast is looking after gardens for people who are not there most of the year. It is a particular kind of job: the garden has to look right on the day guests arrive, and you need to know it does without driving down to check.

We work to a schedule that suits the letting calendar rather than the calendar month, send photos after each visit, and flag anything that needs a decision rather than making it for you. If something has come down in a gale we will tell you the same day.

Getting a garden ready for the season

Coastal gardens take their punishment in winter and need putting right before the season starts, not during it. That means cutting back the salt-burned growth once the risk of further blows has passed, checking and repairing boundaries and gates, getting on top of the first flush of weed growth, and replacing anything that has not made it through.

Doing that in one visit in early spring is far cheaper than trying to fix it in July with guests in the property.

Kingsbridge, Malborough and the estuary

We cover the wider area around Salcombe as well: Kingsbridge, Malborough, South Pool, and the villages around the estuary. The further up the estuary you go the more shelter you get, and the planting that fails on an exposed Salcombe headland will often do perfectly well a couple of miles inland.