About Us & Our Work
With over 25 years of experience in design and landscaping. Over 1000 gardens to date and numerous assists including 2012 athletes village in Weymouth and Chelsea main avenue builds in 2024. We have the knowledge.
Giles Woodford
Giles has been a designer and creator of gardens since completing a BA in landscape architecture at ECA in 1999. He has run a landscaping company and fulfilled a role as designer estimator at another before now operating as a freelance designer and project manager. A childhood interest in natural history and art combined with many years of landscaping experience equip Giles with the knowledge and desire to take a project from concept to completion.
Alison Neave
Alison is also a graduate from Edinburgh College of Art. Her post graduate degree is in ceramics. A gardener and designer herself, Alison has an exceptionally keen eye for detail, texture and colour. With an ever-growing knowledge of furnishings and features she will find the best available to complement your space.
Environmental Approach
In the last decade sustainability has become a key word in all industries. With increasing pressure on the earth's resources, we can all give a lot back by creating gardens with a range of spaces, biodiversity, plenty of planting and water management strategies. For us as designers this means a whole new set of exciting challenges. With knowledge, imagination and invention it is possible to design stylish gardens that improve our environment, health and wellbeing.
Natural & Reclaimed
At Woodford Neave we want to reduce the negative impact of building a garden by specifying locally sourced and reclaimed materials. There is a huge selection available from merchants and reclamation yards or online at marketplace and ebay. Aggregates, bricks, stone, paving and timber are all available and are often better quality than newly manufactured alternatives. These amazing textures and tones can give an aged feel which in turn creates a sense of permanence. We like to balance the old with the new and find the crisp lines of contemporary furniture contrasting with an aged natural stone or timber can really hit the mark.
Materials Balanced With Nature
Within our designs we like to keep hardscaped areas down to a small percentage of the overall space. Balancing a garden this way helps with drainage, caters for wildlife and can reduce the environmental cost of landscaping your garden. We are always looking for ‘site won’ materials in gardens we survey too. There’s little more satisfying than creating a beautiful path from old walling stone or a turning an old deck into a shed. Removal of waste from gardens is a costly business, often as much as bringing in the replacement so where space allows, we try and keep it and reuse it.