Concept build An example of what Midlands Code Lab would build for a Derby landscaping firm. Not a real business. ← Back to MCL
Garden design & build · Derby & south Derbyshire (concept)

From the garden you avoid to the one you live in.

Garden design, landscaping, driveways and maintenance across Derby and south Derbyshire. Every garden on this site is shown before and after, with the date and the area, because the after is the only advert we've ever needed.

See the transformations → Get a quote
01 / What we do

Design it, build it, drive on it, keep it.

Design

Garden design

Measured survey, a layout plan you can hold and a planting list that suits your soil and your patience. If we build it, the design fee comes off the build.

Design from £450
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Build

Full garden builds

Patios, lawns, sleeper beds, fencing and lighting, sequenced so your garden gets wrecked once, not four times. One person you can ring, start to finish.

Full builds from £6,800
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Driveways

Driveways & paths

Block paving, resin and gravel on a proper sub-base, with the drainage done right so it never puddles at the gate. Old concrete taken away, not skipped on your verge.

Driveways from £4,600
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Maintenance

Garden maintenance

Fortnightly or weekly visits on a plan, billed the same each month all year, so the garden we built stays the garden you bought.

Plans from £120/mo
See the plans →
02 / Before and after

The after does the talking. Drag the line.

Every garden here carries its date and its area. Ask about any of them and we'll tell you the street. The befores stay up on purpose: that's what your garden looks like today, and we've started from worse.

May 2026Littleover DE23Full garden build

A tired lawn sloping into a cracked concrete pad, a fence on its last winter and nowhere to sit after four o'clock. Levelled, porcelain patio, sleeper beds, new turf and lights along the fence line. Eleven days, gate to gate.

Drag the line across. The before is why the after matters.

Before After

Drawn placeholder scenes, not photos, because this page is a concept. A live build uses your own garden photos here, dated and placed the same way.

Mar 2026Mickleover DE3Driveway

Cracked concrete with grass in the joints, out. Block paving on a new sub-base with a soakaway, in. Two cars off the road by Friday.

Oct 2025Allestree DE22Low-maintenance rebuild

An overgrown corner nobody had time for. Sleeper beds, gravel and planting chosen to look after itself. One visit a month keeps it this way.

Jul 2025Duffield DE56Front garden & path

The one the neighbours ask about. New path, low hedging and planting that flowers in sequence, so it never has an off month.

Dates and areas on this concept are invented, and every "photo" is a drawn placeholder, captioned as such. On a real build these are the firm's actual gardens, straight off the phone, dated and placed the same way, and the gallery grows with every job.

03 / How we work

No surprises, in writing.

A garden build lives in your home for weeks. Here's the order things happen in, and exactly when money changes hands.

1

Photos and a postcode

Send phone photos of the garden and your postcode through the form below. We quote a realistic range from those, so neither of us spends an evening on a job that was never going to fit.

2

One visit, measured

If the range works for you, we come out once, measure properly and turn it into a fixed written price with dates on it.

3

The build, sequenced

Groundworks, hard landscaping, planting, in that order, with one person you can ring. You'll know which days we're there and what happens when it rains.

4

The walk-round

You walk the finished garden with us before the final payment. Anything not right goes on a list with a date next to it, not a shrug.

Money, out in the open

Staged payments, printed here.

To book

Nothing. A start date costs a signature, not a deposit. Design work is priced separately and comes off the build if we do it.

Materials

25% when materials are ordered. Never before, never in cash, and it's on the written quote with the date beside it.

Mid-build

One stage payment at a point named in the quote, usually when the hard landscaping is down. You'll never be asked for money at a point you didn't agree to before we started.

Balance

After the walk-round. When you've walked the finished garden and you're happy. Not when the van leaves.

A garden build is a five-figure trust exercise with a stranger's digger in it. This box is how we earn that trust before we've lifted a slab.

04 / Get a quote

Start with photos, not a site visit.

Phone photos of the garden as it is today, plus your postcode and a rough budget. That's enough for a realistic range, and it keeps our site visits for jobs that are actually happening, which is why our quotes come back fast.

That's the flow. On the live site this lands in the firm's inbox with the photos attached, and the postcode and budget quietly filter the enquiries that were never going to book, so every site visit is for a real job. This page is a concept, so nothing was sent and your photos never left your device.
05 / After the build

Gardens don't stay finished on their own.

Every build comes with the offer of a plan. One monthly amount, the same in January as in June, so there are no winter invoices to chase and the garden never slides back towards its before photo.

Fortnightly
£120/mo
Billed monthly, all year

Lawns cut and edged, beds weeded, hedges kept in shape. Every other week March to October, monthly through winter, and a text the evening before each visit.

Join the round →
Weekly
£220/mo
Billed monthly, all year

The full keep. Weekly visits in season, planting refreshed spring and autumn, and the garden lighting checked before the clocks change.

Join the round →
One-off tidy
from £180
Priced from photos

A day's blitz to get a garden back under control before summer or a sale. Most one-offs become fortnightlies, which tells you something.

Book a tidy →

Plan prices on this concept are invented. The model is the point: even monthly billing that runs itself, a reminder before each visit, and renewals that don't rely on anyone's memory in November.

06 / Word of mouth

What Derby says.

"The quote came back from photos in two days, and it was the number we ended up paying. The garden in their pictures is the garden we got."
Rachel W · Littleover · the May build above
"They told us the payment stages before we asked. None of the other quotes did. That decided it before the design did."
Mark & Priya S · Mickleover
"Two years of fortnightly visits and it still looks like the after photo. The text the night before each visit sounds like a small thing. It isn't."
Eileen B · Allestree

Example reviews with invented names, marked as such because this page is a concept. A live build pulls real reviews from the firm's Google profile.

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