"We should get this back in order." The call almost always comes once the garden has become a visible problem — a hedge spilling onto the street, a lawn nobody crosses any more, branches against a roof. By then the work required has nothing to do with maintenance: it is restoration, and it costs several times what regular visits would have.
Maintaining is not tidying
The confusion is common and it distorts everything: a garden is not a space you clean, it is a living whole you steer.
Tidying means removing what is in the way. Maintaining means acting on what is going to grow: pruning to direct growth, thinning to let air through, weeding before plants seed, watering according to the season rather than habit. The visible result is sometimes the same on day one; it diverges completely after six months.
It is also what separates this trade from a cleaning service: the object of the work is not a surface, it is a plant that reacts to what you do to it.
The visit: reading a garden
You do not price a garden from a stated area. The same number of square metres can mean a simple lawn to mow or a set of shrubs, trees, beds and paths calling for four different kinds of work.
What is observed during the visit: the nature and state of the planting, the species present and what they tolerate, exposure and shade, the soil, the presence and function of a water point, access — will a wheelbarrow pass? can a trailer get close? —, boundaries with neighbours, proximity to a roof or to cables, and the starting condition.
Use is also discussed: a garden where children play, a garden looked at from a terrace and a garden fronting a shop do not call for the same trade-offs.
Rhythm, not the calendar
This is the trade's economic principle, and it is easily demonstrated to a client.
A hedge worked three times a year is cut with hand tools, quickly, and keeps its shape. The same hedge left for two years takes a whole operation to recover, and several seasons to regain a silhouette. Regular visits are not more expensive: they are cheaper, spread differently.
The useful rhythm does not transfer from one garden to another. It depends on the species, the season, the rainfall, the watering and what the client expects. A serious contract therefore provides for a frequency that varies through the year rather than a fixed number of visits applied from January to December.
Price levels depend on the local market, the area, the starting condition and the nature of the work: no general scale means anything. Deposit, suspension and termination terms belong to the contract and the applicable law.
Choosing what will hold
This is the advice with the most value, and it is given when planting or replacing.
A plant suited to the local climate, exposure and soil asks little: it gets through the dry season without daily watering, stands up to heavy rain and comes back on its own. An unsuitable plant demands constant attention and dies anyway — having cost water, time and a replacement.
The gardener's role is therefore not to sell what looks good in a pot, but to say what will hold where the client wants to put it. It is advice that loses a one-off sale and gains a lasting client.
Pruning: when, why, how far
Pruning is the trade's most technical act and the most misunderstood.
You do not prune to shorten: you prune to direct, to open up, to encourage branching, to remove dead wood or to clear access. Timing matters as much as technique — pruning at the wrong moment removes the year's flowering or lastingly weakens a plant. Those moments depend on the species and the local climate, and they are learned in the field rather than from a universal calendar.
One limit deserves stating: pruning large trees, working aloft in a tree and any work near power lines are not routine maintenance. These are situations calling for specific skills, equipment and sometimes authorisations, according to locally applicable rules. A serious gardener says what they do not do and refers the client to a properly equipped firm, rather than climbing a tree because the client insists.
Green waste
What is cut must leave. That is obvious to the professional and rarely to the client, who sometimes finds a heap at the bottom of the garden three weeks after the visit.
Removal is therefore part of the service and appears on the quotation: volume, transport, destination. Depending on the context, some of it can be used on site — shredding, mulching, composting — which reduces transport and returns the material to the soil. What cannot be is handed to a suitable route where one exists; improvised burning is not a disposal method.
Treatment products: the limit
Many gardeners are asked to "treat" something — insects, a fungus, invasive weeds. This is where caution comes first.
The first professional reflex is to look for a cause before a product: unsuitable watering, poor air circulation, compacted soil, a badly placed plant explain many problems people believe must be treated chemically. Many are settled by a cultural practice, not a bottle.
Where a product is contemplated, an international framework exists. The International Code of Conduct on Pesticide Management, led by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, is a voluntary framework covering the whole life cycle of pesticides — production, regulation, distribution, use and disposal — and is addressed particularly to contexts where national legislation is inadequate or absent. What follows for a gardener comes down to little: use only products authorised in their country for the intended use, follow the label and the manufacturer's documentation, wear the protection specified, keep children and animals away, never decant into an unmarked container and never mix two products. No indication of product, dose or mixture belongs in an article: these are data specific to each product and each country.
Another dimension is worth knowing when plants are brought in: the International Plant Protection Convention, administered by FAO and signed by more than one hundred and eighty countries, frames the international movement of plants in order to limit the spread of pests. A gardener who brings in plants from far away — or advises a client to bring some back — does well to know that formalities exist.
In the African context
Conditions vary sharply between countries, cities and seasons: there is no typical African garden, and two districts of the same city can impose opposite rhythms.
The first reality is seasonality. Where the alternation between rainy and dry seasons is marked, plants do not grow at the same rate from one month to the next: a fortnightly visit may be insufficient in full growth and excessive a few months later. A contract that follows that alternation serves better than a fixed rhythm, and it sells better because it can be explained.
The second is water. Depending on the city and neighbourhood, access to water is irregular or expensive, which makes daily watering of demanding species untenable. That shifts the trade's value towards the choice of plants and water-saving techniques — mulching, shading, planting at the right moment — rather than towards watering itself. That is advice worth charging for.
The third is the available planting. Depending on the region, the species that thrive without constant care are well identified locally, and the corresponding know-how is passed on in the field. A gardener who knows what holds up in their city brings something no imported catalogue does.
The fourth is the nature of clients. Depending on the market, a significant share of regular demand comes from companies, hotels, schools, embassies, managing agents and residences rather than from isolated households. These clients contract, require an invoice and judge on regularity — which strongly favours whoever keeps a schedule and reports.
The fifth is structuring. The International Labour Organization documents the scale of informal employment in its statistical study on women and men in the informal economy, and garden maintenance is a common example: it is practised job by job as much as within equipped businesses. The opportunity is clear for those who structure themselves: equipment brought, waste removed, a schedule kept, quotations and invoices open a market that occasional work does not reach. Digital contributes unevenly: messaging serves to send a photograph after each visit — which matters particularly for an absent owner — and mobile payment to settle a monthly contract remotely. The International Telecommunication Union puts the share of the world's population using the Internet at 74 per cent in 2025, with 36 per cent for Africa, the lowest of the regions it measures: these channels matter where they exist, without replacing the visit to the garden.
What a gardener does not promise
They do not guarantee that a planting will take, nor how a species poorly suited to the place will behave, nor a result on a garden they do not maintain regularly, nor the lasting disappearance of a pest, nor the condition of a tree whose assessment calls for specific expertise. They stand in neither for a tree surgery firm equipped for work at height, nor for a qualified professional on anything to do with services or structures.
What they do commit to can be checked: a visit before quoting, a written scope, a rhythm discussed and adapted to the seasons, equipment brought, waste removed, a clear line on treatment products, and an invoice.
That is also what makes the business credible: real past work, a schedule kept, reports after visits, quotations and invoices, and genuine reviews. Here the proof is visible: a well-kept garden can be seen from the street.
Artificial intelligence can help prepare a seasonal schedule, draft a report, sort photographs or organise rounds. It does not see the garden, does not identify a disease from a description, does not say what will grow in a given spot, and replaces neither a product's label nor the rules applicable in the country.