Small commercial grounds — Ashcombe high street

Before: A shared courtyard behind a row of high-street units: planters full of dead annuals, weeds in the joint lines, and no one whose job it was to keep it presentable. A handful of dispute-free tenants, but no ownership of the green space.

After: A simple, maintenance-friendly plan. We took on the planters with a structure-and-evergreen scheme that needs only seasonal colour changes, keep the joints and boundary weed-free monthly, and look after the small lawn square that had been mown, if at all, whenever anyone remembered.

• Replanted the planters with perennial structure + two rounds of seasonal colour.
• Monthly maintenance: weeding, cutting, edging and litter-wise tidy.
• Spring and autumn twice-overs for the heavier jobs.
• A one-page plan every tenant could see, so the cost and the schedule were clear.

The courtyard went from "the alley behind the shops" to somewhere people actually sit — which is the whole point of the plan. The tenants split the modest cost and renew it each year.