Landscape work for properties that have to look finished every day of the season, and cannot close to get there.
A hotel garden is an operating asset, not a private one.
It is looked at by paying guests every day, photographed constantly, and judged against the room rate. It has to hold that standard through a Rajasthan summer, on the water the property can actually get, while the property stays open.
Those constraints change the work, not just the planting list. We have built and maintained landscapes at Raj Niwas in Dholpur, Narsingh Bagh, Inder Prakash in Udaipur and Lodha Farm, and the pages below describe how we scope, phase and hand over that work.
Occupancy. The site cannot be opened all at once. Work is zoned, hoarded and sequenced against the property's own calendar — which means weddings, conferences and the season, not a generic programme. Deliveries and spoil removal are routed away from guest circulation, and the noisy operations are booked rather than assumed.
The daily standard. A private garden is allowed an untidy fortnight. A resort is not. Schemes for hospitality are composed so that something is always in flower and nothing is ever mid-collapse — which means more layers, more succession, and deliberately fewer species that look wretched out of season.
Water accountability. Properties here buy water in summer. A landscape that cannot state its own demand is a liability on a budget line, so we hydrozone, meter where we can, and design the lawn area down rather than defending it later.
Safety and access. Guests walk through a live construction site. Edges, levels, lighting and surface finish are part of the scheme, not an afterthought handed to somebody else.
A hospitality scope of works from us covers, in order: survey and soil testing; water source assessment; drawn planting and services plans; ground preparation; irrigation; hard elements where they form part of the scheme; planting; and a defined establishment period after handover.
Excluded items are written down as plainly as included ones. Civil works, structural waterproofing, external lighting circuits and pool plant are commonly assumed to be inside a landscape package and commonly are not. Naming them at quotation stage is duller than discovering them at month four.
Where a property is running a tender, we can supply the scope in the format the consultant is working in, and we will say at survey stage if something in the brief will not survive here rather than pricing it and building it anyway.
The programme is written in zones, each with its own start, finish and reinstatement date, so the property always knows which part of the garden is out of use and when it comes back.
Planting is scheduled to the season first and the programme second — there is no sense finishing a zone in May if it means replanting it in September. Where a handover date forces summer work, we say so, plan shade and additional establishment water for it, and price it honestly instead of absorbing the losses quietly.
Every zone is handed back clean. Guests should not be able to tell which part was finished last week.
A landscape handed over without documentation becomes unmaintainable the moment the people who built it leave. Ours comes with:
An as-built planting plan — what was planted, where, and in what quantity, so a replacement in year four is the same species and not an approximation.
An irrigation schematic — zones, valves, emitter types and controller programmes, so the property's engineer can isolate a zone without guessing.
A maintenance regime — species by species and season by season, written down. Pruning windows, feeding, the summer and monsoon changes, and what must not be done.
A defined establishment period, with an agreed replacement provision, so the first eighteen months are a contractual position rather than an argument.
Most of the landscape failures we are called to inspect were not built badly. They were built well and then maintained by nobody in particular.
Our annual maintenance contracts cover scheduled pruning and formative work, soil and feeding programmes, pest and disease watch, irrigation servicing — filters, flushing, emitter checks, seasonal controller changes — and seasonal replanting where the scheme calls for it. Visit frequency is set by the property and the season rather than sold as a flat monthly figure.
Where a property has its own horticulture team, we work the other way round: train them on the scheme, leave the written regime, and attend on a reduced schedule for the work that needs a specialist. Full detail on the estate maintenance page.
Every discipline is delivered in-house, which on a live property matters more than it does on a private garden — there is one party accountable for the programme and one crew moving through guest areas, not four.
Soft landscaping — the planting composition and the soil work under it.
Terrace gardens — roof terraces and podiums, where load and waterproofing come before planting.
Irrigation — hydrozoned drip and the filtration that hard bore water demands.
Kitchen gardens — planned backwards from the chef's menu, not planted as a display.
Pergolas and shade — structures detailed for the load of mature climbers and for real shade at four o'clock.
Estate maintenance — the contract that holds all of it at standard.
The full list of services covers each in detail.
Most of our hospitality work is on occupied properties. The site is divided into zones with clean hoarding lines, noisy and dusty operations are scheduled against the property's own occupancy and event calendar, and material movement is routed away from guest circulation. This is planned into the programme from the start — it is slower than working on a closed site, and the programme should say so rather than discover it in week three.
Ours cover survey and soil testing, drawn planting and services plans, ground preparation, irrigation, planting, and a defined establishment period after handover. Hard landscaping is included where it is part of the scheme. What is excluded is written down as plainly as what is included, because that is where disputes start.
Further than most properties expect, and the constraint is the planting season rather than the build. There are two good planting windows in this region, so the date the garden must be presentable determines which window we work back from. A garden that has to read as mature on opening day means larger stock, a longer establishment regime and a different budget from one allowed two seasons to fill in.
Yes, and a good deal of our maintenance work starts that way. We survey the planting and the irrigation first and report plainly what can be brought back and what cannot, before quoting anything. A monthly figure against an unsurveyed garden is a guess.
Establishment is where schemes are won or lost, so we prefer to carry the first eighteen months ourselves under an annual maintenance contract. Where a property has its own horticulture team we train them on the scheme and leave a written regime — species by species, season by season — rather than a verbal handover that leaves with whoever was on shift.
Yes, on design and build where the project justifies the travel. The sequence changes: we begin with drawings and photographs, make a survey visit before anything is finalised, and build the maintenance regime around the property's own team rather than ours.
Every scheme begins with a survey. Send us the essentials and we will arrange one, then return a drawn plan — not a quotation against an assumption.
OR REACH US DIRECTLY