Property services
Gardeners
Terraces, citrus, and gardens that predate the road.
8 teams on the network Lake Como
Start underneath. Almost every established garden on this lake is built on terracing laid dry, without mortar, so that water coming down the hillside can pass through the wall rather than build up behind it. Those walls are structure. When one bulges after a wet February, that is the important event of the gardening year, and the correct response is a mason and possibly a consent, not more planting. A team that understands this walks the walls in late winter, keeps the drainage channels above the terraces clear, watches the point where a mature root is levering stone apart, and tells you early. A team that does not will mow, strim, blow the leaves into the lake and leave you with a collapse that costs many times a decade of maintenance.
Above that sits water, in both directions. The lake gives these gardens their reputation, with humid air, mild winters and frost that rarely bites at the shore, and it also means summer drought arrives fast on a south-facing terrace with thin soil over rock. Irrigation here is not a convenience; it is the difference between a garden and a brown slope, and it fails in the weeks nobody is looking. The pattern is dismally consistent: a controller loses its programme in June, the family arrives in the last week of July, and the hydrangeas have already gone. Zoning, filtration where lake water is used, hard water on the drip lines, and somebody physically walking the system in early summer are what prevent it.
Then the planting, which is where these gardens earn their reputation and where most of the specialist knowledge sits. Camellias and azaleas on the acid soils, mature magnolias, plane trees that were pollarded on a cycle somebody has to continue, wisteria that will lift render off a faade if it is left, olives on the drier terraces, and citrus in pots that have to be moved into a limonaia or a sheltered loggia before the first cold nights and brought back out in spring. Half of what is growing in an old Como garden predates the road along the shore, which means it also predates any of the assumptions a general landscaping firm brings with it. The pruning windows are inherited rather than invented, and a garden set back by a wrong cut takes years, not seasons, to recover.
01What they actually do
The terraces and their walls
Walking the dry-stone retaining walls after the winter, keeping the drainage above them open, and calling in a mason before a bulge becomes a collapse.
Citrus, camellias and the overwintering
Feeding on acid soils, moving potted citrus into the limonaia before the cold and back out in spring, and the pruning cycles the old plantings expect.
Irrigation
Zoning, filtration where the supply is drawn from the lake, and a full walk of the system in early summer rather than a call in August.
Trees and the shoreline edge
Pollarding on the inherited cycle, taking down what the storms have loosened above the house, and keeping the lake boundary and jetty planting in order.
02How we choose
We judge gardeners in March, not in June. Anyone can make a garden look presentable in early summer; what we want to see is the winter work: walls inspected, drainage cleared, prunes made at the right time and to the right shape, pots moved before the cold rather than after it. We ask to see two gardens the team has held for several years, because the only real test of a gardener is a garden that is visibly better than it was when they took it on.
No team pays to be listed, and we take nothing when an owner engages one. It would be an odd thing to accept money for, given that our own interest is entirely in the work standing up over years, and a gardener chosen for the wrong reason shows up on a terrace wall five years later.
Teams come off the list when the work becomes maintenance in the narrowest sense: cutting and blowing, nothing observed, nothing reported, the walls untouched. We also remove anyone who takes on more houses in the spring than they can hold in July, which is the standard failure in this trade. Where we have no team we can stand behind for a particular stretch of shore, we say so rather than sending an owner to whoever is nearest.
Gardeners: questions
How often does a Lake Como garden need attention?
Through the whole year, with the heaviest work in late winter and early spring and a steady weekly presence from April to October.
The winter visits are the ones owners are tempted to cut and the ones that matter most: walls, drainage, pruning and the overwintering of pots. A garden maintained only in season looks acceptable for two or three years and then starts losing structure, at which point recovering it is a building job as much as a gardening one.
How is garden maintenance charged on Lake Como?
Normally as an annual contract covering an agreed number of visits with a defined scope, with major works, tree surgery and replanting quoted separately. We do not publish rates.
What moves the figure is the area, how much of it is terraced, whether there is irrigation to run, how many pots have to be moved twice a year, and whether the team is also responsible for the boundary above the house. Ask what the contract excludes, and in particular whether waste removal is inside it, because on a site with no vehicle access that is not a trivial cost.
What grows well on Lake Como?
The lake keeps winters mild at the shore, which supports camellias and azaleas on the acid soils, oleander, magnolia, wisteria, olives on the drier terraces and citrus kept in pots under cover for the coldest months.
Altitude changes the answer quickly. A hundred metres above the water is a different climate, and gardens on the shaded eastern flanks behave differently again from south-facing terraces. Any planting plan that ignores where on the hillside it sits will disappoint in its second winter.
Who deals with a terrace wall that is starting to move?
A builder or mason rather than a gardener, and on a protected property it may need consent before it is rebuilt, because garden walls and terracing are often covered by the same listing as the house.
The gardener's job is to see it early and to keep the drainage above it working, which is what usually caused the movement in the first place. Rebuilding dry-stone to the original line is a specialist skill, and it is not improved by pointing the wall in cement, which is the intervention that guarantees the next failure.
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For people who work on the lake
Are you the bestat what you do here?
The list we introduce from is short and grows slowly: by working with somebody, seeing how a job goes, and only then adding them. If that is the standard you hold yourself to, tell us who you are. We read every one. We check work before we introduce anybody, and no money passes in either direction.
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