Hiring a gardener vs doing it yourself

Most gardens in the UK end up somewhere between two extremes: entirely self-maintained, or handed over completely to a professional. Deciding where a particular household sits on that spectrum usually comes down to garden size, available time, and how comfortable someone is with the riskier or more physically demanding jobs, rather than any fixed rule about what a "proper" gardener does versus what an owner should manage alone.

A large share of routine garden upkeep is genuinely manageable without professional help. Mowing, weeding, light pruning, planting bedding plants or vegetables, deadheading, and general tidying are all tasks most people can learn quickly and carry out safely with basic tools. None of these require specialist equipment beyond what is affordable to buy outright, and getting them slightly wrong, an uneven lawn stripe or a badly timed prune, is rarely serious or expensive to fix. This is the layer of gardening that rewards regular, small amounts of attention rather than skill, which makes it well suited to doing yourself even for someone with no gardening background.

Other jobs are generally worth outsourcing, mainly because the risks or the equipment involved go beyond what makes sense for a household to take on for occasional use. Tree work at height, particularly anything needing a ladder, harness or chainsaw, carries a genuine risk of serious injury and is usually best left to a qualified, insured tree surgeon. Heavy landscaping, such as building retaining walls, laying large areas of patio or decking, or regrading drainage, calls for skills and sometimes machinery that most people do not have reason to own. An initial garden redesign, where the whole layout of beds, paths and planting is being rethought, also tends to benefit from professional input, both for the practical construction work and for getting the overall design right the first time rather than through costly trial and error.

Doing routine maintenance yourself means budgeting for equipment rather than labour. A basic corded electric lawn mower suitable for a small to medium lawn commonly costs somewhere around £90 to £150, while cordless battery models with more power and no cable to manage typically run from about £150 up to £350 or more depending on battery size. Petrol mowers, usually chosen for larger lawns or rougher grass, commonly range from roughly £250 up to £700 for a self-propelled model. Hedge trimmers follow a similar pattern: basic corded or entry-level cordless trimmers are commonly available from around £50 to £150, while petrol or long-reach models for taller hedges can run from £150 up to £400 or more. Strimmers span an even wider range, with simple corded models starting around £25 to £40 and heavier-duty cordless or petrol brushcutters reaching £200 to £500. These are one-off purchase costs, though most equipment also needs occasional servicing, replacement parts such as trimmer line or mower blades, and somewhere dry to store it.

The time commitment for DIY maintenance adds up more than many people expect. Through the main growing season, from roughly March to October, an average lawn commonly needs mowing weekly, with watering, deadheading and weeding as ongoing background tasks most weeks. Hedges typically need trimming once or twice a year depending on the species and how tidy an owner wants them, and borders need a proper tidy-up in both spring and autumn. For a modest garden this might add up to an hour or two a week through the summer months, but a larger or more heavily planted garden can easily take considerably longer, particularly if it has been let go for a season or two and needs catching up.

Hiring a professional gardener tends to make the most financial and practical sense once a garden is large, overgrown, or simply more than the available time can keep on top of. Gardener rates in the UK commonly run to around £25 to £35 an hour, or up to roughly £150 to £280 a day depending on location and experience, with landscaping work generally charged at a higher day rate again. Specialist jobs are priced separately: professional hedge trimming commonly costs somewhere around £60 to £120 an hour, rising to roughly £100 to £140 an hour where climbing equipment is needed to reach a tall hedge safely. Set against the cost and hassle of buying suitable equipment for a single overgrown hedge or an occasional big tidy-up, hiring someone in for that specific job is often the more sensible option, even for a household that handles everything else itself.

In practice, the most common approach for UK gardens sits somewhere in the middle: doing the routine work, mowing, weeding, light pruning and planting, without help, while bringing in a professional for the occasional bigger job that needs particular skill, equipment or a head for heights. This hybrid approach avoids paying ongoing hourly rates for tasks that are simple to do at home, while still getting specialist jobs done safely and to a proper standard. It also means equipment spending can be kept to the basics that genuinely get used every week, rather than buying a chainsaw or hedge trimmer capable of tackling a job that only comes up once a year.

The most useful question to ask, when deciding which category a job falls into, is not really about cost at all but about consequence: what happens if this goes wrong. A poorly mown lawn or a badly timed prune is easily corrected. A fall from height, a damaged boundary wall, or a botched drainage job is not, and that difference is usually a better guide than price alone to what is worth doing yourself and what is worth paying someone else to do properly.

Frequently asked questions