Whether you may be a business, residence or a body corporate we can and would love help you. Tim Phillips owner/manager of Great Gardens and a qualified Horticulturist has a wealth of experience ranging from leading teams of gardeners maintaining the residences of high profile personalities to being in charge of large workforces constructing multi million dollar resort landscapes overseas. At Great Gardens we aim to provide you with a “hassle free” service as we believe that you gardens should be enjoyed not endured. We cover the entire Gold Coast and have clients from Sanctuary Cove in the north to Banora Point in the south; the majority of our regular clients however are from the northern suburbs including Sanctuary Cove, Hope Island, Helensvale and their surrounding suburbs. There are a few things to consider when you’re looking to employ someone’s services to complete your garden related tasks, Firstly service providers fall loosely in to three categories, Jack of all trades, masters of none, you can tell people in this category by the multiple services their business advertise, they may be good at doing multiple odd jobs but generally due to the fact they don’t specialise in or have full time demand for their skills as a gardener means they are not great at it. Professional Gardeners, put simply Gardeners who choose to do it as their profession, they only do garden related tasks and therefore have more experience and are generally better at it than jack of all trades types, however due to a lack of qualifications they typically have a limited knowledge on garden related topics, their lack of motivation to gain any qualifications is often also an indicator of their lack of passion for what they do. Horticulturists, what makes someone a horticulturist is subject to opinion, some will claim a formal qualification is enough while others claim that a 4 year apprenticeship or a qualification with 5 years industry experience is required. We subscribe the later as this is inline with other trades. Therefore a Horticulturist brings with them not only the necessary knowledge, skills and experience to do the job quickly and to a high standard also but generally a passion for what they do. Cost is always a major consideration when making your choice however purely comparing hourly rates can be problematic at best, an incompetent gardener can prune/fertilise/water in a way that can actually damage your plants and end up costing you a lot more than their cheap hourly rate by the time you rectify their mistakes. A good gardener or horticulturist, someone with the right skills, equipment and know how can literally complete a job in half the time of your average person making a more expensive hourly rate actually the cheaper option. Like most things, you usually get what you pay for so get a price before you engage any one wether it be a fixed price or a set/capped amount of hours at an hourly rate, it also pays to find out if any chemical/fertilisers/waste removal is included in the price or will be added on top of other charges. In short if you are looking for someone to do a quality job then you should look for a qualified and experienced (5 years+) Horticulturist who has the right equipment to do the job and can give you examples of their work (on a website, photos, nearby jobs etc) and finally is charging a price you are willing to pay.