Over 20,000 plants pass through Ginkgo Gardens in a single year, which gives some sense of the scale this London company works at. It has been designing and building gardens since 1990, employs more than 80 people, and counts a client base of roughly 5,500 spread across private homeowners, businesses, and larger organisations. That is a long way from the lone landscaper with a van, and the breadth of the operation shapes most of what the site has to show.

The work splits into three clear areas. The first is garden design, covering full makeovers, roof terraces, front gardens, planting schemes, and water features. The second is landscape construction, and this is where the list runs long: terraces, decking, fencing, natural and artificial lawns, garden lighting, resin-bound surfacing, tree surgery, playground design, and irrigation systems. The third is grounds maintenance, where ongoing contracts keep finished gardens in good condition across the seasons. Tree surgery and irrigation appear in more than one division, which tracks with how those jobs straddle the line between building a garden and looking after it.

Alongside the design and build sides, Ginkgo Gardens runs a plant supply arm. It sources and delivers plants directly, with planting carried out on site, and that 20,000-a-year figure suggests the nursery function is a real part of the business rather than a sideline. For a client commissioning a planting scheme, having the supplier and the designer under one roof removes a layer of coordination that often goes wrong when those roles sit with separate firms.

Who hires a firm this size?

The client list is more varied than you might expect for a garden company. Domestic homeowners are in there, but so are property management companies, social housing groups, hotels, schools, and corporate headquarters. That spread, across London and the Southeast, explains why the service menu reaches into areas like playground design and large-scale grounds maintenance contracts that a purely residential outfit would never touch. A firm maintaining the grounds of a housing estate needs a different toolkit from one redesigning a single back garden, and Ginkgo Gardens appears set up to do both.

The track record backs the scale up with specifics. Ginkgo Gardens has designed over 1,000 gardens and has taken awards at both the Chelsea and Hampton Court Flower Shows. Those two shows are about as serious as garden recognition gets in the UK, and an award there is not handed out lightly. For anyone weighing whether a designer can deliver something beyond the competent and tidy, that is a concrete marker of ambition and skill, not a vague claim about quality.

What the awards and the show appearances point to is a company comfortable at the high end of design while still running the unglamorous maintenance contracts that pay the bills year-round. Holding both ends of that range is harder than it sounds, and it is the kind of thing a small studio cannot manage and a pure maintenance contractor would not attempt. Ginkgo Gardens has managed to position itself at both ends, and the 35-plus-year history makes it harder to write that off as marketing.

Where the picture gets more mixed

Reputation is the part of the listing that does not run all one way. There is no large body of public consumer reviews for Ginkgo Gardens on the platforms most people check first. A search across Google, Trustpilot, and Yelp turned up no significant review count for the UK entity, which is a little surprising given the size and history of the firm. A company that has built over a thousand gardens has plenty of satisfied clients somewhere, but those voices are not gathered on the usual rating sites where a prospective customer would go looking.

What does surface is more cautionary. The business directory britainfirm.com lists a 2.5-star rating, and at least one negative comment there refers to driving conduct, presumably from a van encountered on the road rather than the garden work itself. Behaviour behind the wheel says little about the standard of a finished terrace or planting scheme, but it is the kind of complaint that sticks. Indeed shows employee reviews for Ginkgo Gardens as well, though no overall score was visible at the time of writing, so the inside view is harder to read in either direction.

Set against the awards and the long history, a single low rating on one minor platform is limited evidence, and it would be wrong to lean on it heavily. The absence of a strong, verifiable review presence on mainstream platforms is still worth naming plainly. A prospective client ends up relying on the company's own portfolio and its show credentials more than on a crowd of independent voices, and people differ on how comfortable they are with that. The testimonials page on the Ginkgo Gardens site gives some sense of customer feedback, though testimonials chosen and published by the firm sit in a different category from independent reviews and should be read as such.

Reaching them

Contact details are not buried. A phone number, an email, and a full postal address for the office near Vauxhall Bridge Road are all displayed plainly. For a company that takes on contracts from housing groups and corporate clients, that openness is expected, but plenty of firms still make it harder than it needs to be. For larger clients running procurement checks, a fixed London address is useful in a way that a mobile number alone is not, and Ginkgo Gardens provides both without fuss.

One practical note for anyone comparing options: the combination of a quarter-century-plus history, flower-show awards, an in-house plant supply, and a maintenance arm makes Ginkgo Gardens a natural fit for clients who want one firm to handle a garden from drawing board through to long-term upkeep. Someone after a quick, cheap one-off tidy may find a smaller local gardener a better match. The strengths of Ginkgo Gardens are pitched at people commissioning design-led work or signing maintenance contracts of some weight, and the pricing almost certainly reflects that.

The listing itself gives a fair summary of the range, though the depth only becomes clear once you read through what each division covers. The plant nursery line in particular is easy to overlook and ends up being one of the more distinctive things about Ginkgo Gardens. Across the offering, the recurring theme is breadth: design, build, supply, and maintain, all from the same SW1 office. The flower-show wins are the headline credential for Ginkgo Gardens, and a quieter, less settled review record sits alongside them. A prospective client should weigh both when deciding whether to make contact.

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