LAND AND LABOUR
Practice
SWALE is a design-build studio, which means the people who draw a garden are on site while it is built. There is no handover between an office and a contractor, and no drawing that survives contact with the ground unchanged.
TOOL WALL · STUDIO · 38 HAND TOOLS · 2026
Everything that leaves in the truck
One crew, start to finish
Five people build, and two of them draw. Nothing is subcontracted except the electrical connection on a lighting job. It keeps the work slower than it could be and it means the person who set a stone is the person who has to answer for it a year later.
Materials from close by
Stone from within the county, plants grown in the region, and whatever the site already has. Broken concrete comes back as steppers, and prunings are chipped on site and go straight back down as mulch. This is as much about the truck as about the material.
Drawings that expect to change
We draw enough to price and permit the work, and then we mark up the same sheet on site. Revision C is normal. A plan that never changed is usually a plan nobody checked against the ground.
Coming back
Every build includes visits at three months and at the end of the first summer, to cut irrigation run times and thin whatever ran away. Maintenance after that is the owner's, and we write the schedule down in plain language before we leave.