.png)
A courtyard instead of a lawn that never dries
Some lawns are never going to work. If the ground is low, the water sits, the grass dies back and the area becomes something you walk around instead of using. At Morningside we stopped trying to keep grass alive in a wet hollow, raised the ground and built a courtyard that drains itself.
The job at a glance
Where: the front garden of a villa, the only part of the property visible from the street.
Before: a low, uneven lawn that flooded often, a broken concrete entrance patio and overgrown beds.
After: a compacted hoggin courtyard, a paved entrance, the old patio tiled, and every bed replanted.
Time: 4 weeks on site.
Raising the ground with sleepers
Railway sleepers do two jobs here. They redefine the entrance, the garden beds and the hedge edge, and because they hold a level, they let the old lawn be raised and turned into a solid courtyard. Every sleeper is fixed to concreted piles with galvanised coach screws, so the edges stay where they're put.
The courtyard itself is compacted hoggin over a compacted GAP20 base. GAP20 is "General All Passing 20", a crushed basecourse that compacts hard and lets water through. Hoggin is a fine gravel-and-clay mix that binds into a firm, natural-looking surface. Together they drain naturally, which is what the lawn never did.
The entrance and the old patio
The entrance is 600 × 600 concrete pavers on a mortar base over compacted GAP20, surrounded by river pebbles and framed in railway sleepers.
The old concrete entrance patio was broken and uneven, but we didn't rip it out. Its edge was secured with a reinforced concrete border and D12 steel, the surface was resurfaced with a dry sand-and-cement mix, and then it was tiled.
The existing colonial-style pedestrian gate was kept too. It was fully renovated, sanded and painted, and rehung on a new post in a raised position to suit the new levels.
Planting
Every bed was replanted in premium lawn soil and finished in cambium mulch, with a new star jasmine garden along the patio. Sleepers, pavers, soil, mulch, pebbles, hoggin and GAP20 all came from Central Landscape Supplies, and everything was built by Franc Landscapes with no other trades.
This was also the job that started Franc Landscapes. A former client, from when Kevin worked for another landscaping company, rang him directly to look at the front yard, the last part of their garden nobody had got to.
4 weeks on site
What actually decides it
Whether the ground can drain. If the lawn is the low point, grass will keep struggling. Raising the level and changing the surface fixes the cause.
What's hidden. A lot of this job is underneath: compacted GAP20, a mortar base under the pavers, the reinforced border on the old patio, and the concreted piles under every sleeper. It's why the courtyard stays flat.
What to keep. The old patio and the old gate both stayed, reworked instead of replaced.
Getting the heights to meet. New levels have to meet the house, the paths and the existing structures without a trip step. Most of the challenge was there.
Where we fit
We design and build garden rebuilds like this end to end, working with what's already good and fixing what isn't. See also raised beds and sleeper edges and fixing a driveway or patio that floods.