A fictional brand, designed and built by Get Ranked On Top. Not a real company.
Back to portfolioVerdance is a nine-person practice working the limestone belt between Broadway and Burford. We design gardens, water meadows and estate frameworks that are legible on the day they are handed over and considerably better a decade later.
The practice was founded in a rented tack room in 2009 by Iona Marchbank, after eleven years at Kim Wilkie Associates and a frustration with drawings that stopped at the point where the plants went in. Verdance was set up to do the whole thing: survey the ground, draw it, tender it, stand in the rain while it is built, and then look after it.
We take on nine or ten projects a year, which is fewer than we could. Every scheme has a named designer from the first site visit to the fifth-year review, and that designer answers the telephone. We do not use visual-only render houses, we do not buy planting plans in, and we have never once specified a plant we have not grown.
Iona Marchbank MSGD
Founding director — masterplanning, levels
Rhys Tolliver
Associate — planting design, nursery liaison
Neve Okonkwo CMLI
Landscape architect — water, consents
Sam Prydderch
Construction — tender, site inspection
We are not on Instagram. Everything we have built is in this index, and most of it is better in year six.
Each index card is the working plan, redrawn at handover. Contours, mown lines, the position of every tree we kept. No photography — gardens photograph best in the two weeks they look least like themselves.
Stanton, Gloucestershire · 4.2 acres · 2023
A Georgian farmhouse that had been swallowed by lawn. We took away three quarters of the mowing and gave back a hay meadow cut on the old two-crop rhythm, with one mown path wide enough for two people and a wheelbarrow.
Ampney Crucis · 1.1 acres · 2022
Nine inches of soil over Cotswold brash. Rather than import loam we planted into the drought — a gravel garden of 60mm limestone chippings laid dry, unirrigated since the first summer and better for it.
Winchcombe · 7 acres · 2021
A culverted stream returned to daylight across a floodplain field, with a shallow scrape that holds water until July. Snipe returned in the second winter; the Environment Agency consent took longer than the build.
Bibury · 0.9 acres walled · 2024
A seventeenth-century kitchen garden brought back into production for a household of five. Sixteen beds on the original quadrant plan, espaliered pears on the south wall, and a dipping tank rebuilt from the footings up.
Kingham · 0.6 acres · 2025
A courtyard for a converted cart shed, six metres wide and overlooked on three sides. One multi-stem Amelanchier, a rill running the long axis, and planting that does its best work in February.
Naunton · 12 acres · 2020 — ongoing
A twenty-five year estate framework: shelter planting on the exposed north scarp, a lime avenue reinstated from the 1841 tithe map, and a phased release of grassland back to the hill.
A Verdance commission runs on the calendar of the garden rather than the calendar of the invoice. Most schemes are surveyed in one winter and planted in the next autumn. We will tell you at the first meeting which November you will be planting in, and we have missed it twice in seventeen years.
Winter — January — March
We start when the garden is honest. Bare structure, standing water, the true line of the wind. Nothing is drawn until the survey is signed off.
Spring — April — June
Concept drawings are made by hand at 1:200 before anything touches CAD. Two rounds of sketch, one card model, and a levels strategy that gets signed in the field.
Summer — July — September
Full construction pack out to tender with three contractors we know. We hold the pencil on site: fortnightly visits, one named contact, no drawings issued we would not build ourselves.
Autumn — October — December
Bare-root goes in from November — cheaper, better rooted, and it establishes while you are indoors. We plant the first season ourselves, then hand over a calendar, not a manual.
Fees are fixed at the end of the winter stage, once we know the ground. A half-acre garden is typically £14,000 — £22,000 in design fees, charged across four stages; construction is contracted separately and we hold no margin on it. We have never issued a fee variation for a change we could have foreseen.
We plant into what is there. Brash gets a dry garden, clay gets a wet one, and in seventeen years we have imported topsoil to exactly two sites — both of them former yards.
Seventy per cent of a Verdance border is a repeating grass or sedge matrix. The named perennials are punctuation. This is why our gardens survive a summer without a gardener.
Anything that collapses wet and black in November is drawn out. We leave stems standing until the first week of March, for the frost, the finches and the sheer look of it.
Molinia caerulea ‘Transparent’
Purple moor grass
Holds low sun from August until the January gales flatten it
Sanguisorba officinalis ‘Red Thunder’
Great burnet
Reads as movement rather than colour — three per square metre
Amsonia hubrichtii
Arkansas blue star
Bought for October, when it turns the colour of a wheat field
Deschampsia cespitosa ‘Goldtau’
Tufted hair grass
Our default matrix on damp ground; never irrigated after year one
Euphorbia ceratocarpa
Horned spurge
Eight months in flower on brash. Tender in a wet clay winter
Persicaria amplexicaulis ‘Firetail’
Red bistort
The only reliable July-to-frost red we will use in a Cotswold border
Carpinus betulus
Hornbeam
Held clipped at 1.8m for enclosure; keeps its bronze leaf to March
Hakonechloa macra
Japanese forest grass
North-facing courtyards only, where it does the work of water
We had been told the meadow would take a decade. It took four years and one very unpopular decision to stop mowing. Iona was right, and had the grace not to say so.
They are the only practice we interviewed who asked to see the water bill before the house. That told us everything.
Two thirds of the gardens in the index above are on a programme with us. It is not a service contract — it is the only way the drawing survives contact with year three. Programmes run from 1 January and are reviewed each November.
£2,400
per year — four visits
For gardens under half an acre with a gardener already in place. We come once a season and correct the drift.
A visit runs from 9.30 to 13.30 with two of our team. You get a marked-up plan by the following Friday listing what was done, what we moved, and the three jobs we would like done before we next see it.
£7,800
per year — monthly
Our most-taken programme. Monthly presence, a named designer, and the plant order placed in your name each August.
The August order matters more than anything else on this list. Bare-root and specialist perennials are booked eleven months ahead; households who order in spring get whatever is left, which is how gardens quietly drift away from their drawings.
from £24,000
per year — fortnightly
For holdings over five acres. Grassland management, tree safety, and a rolling twenty-five year framework reviewed each January.
We hold the long file: the tithe map, the tree survey history, the sward composition counts. When you sell or pass the place on, that file goes with it, which is worth considerably more than the year it costs.
All programme figures exclude VAT and cover a thirty-mile radius of Milton-under-Wychwood. Beyond that we charge travel at 55p per mile. Plants, materials and machinery hire are invoiced at cost with no uplift.
The first visit is two hours on site, on foot, in whatever weather the day offers. You get a written appraisal within ten days: what the ground will and will not do, what we would keep, and an honest fee range. It costs £450 plus VAT and is credited in full against the design fee if you go ahead.
We are taking on four commissions for the 2027 planting season. Two are spoken for. Enquiries received after 30 September will be held for the autumn of 2028.
Before you write
Tell us three things: what the ground is, how long you intend to stay, and the one view you would defend. That is enough for us to know whether we are the right practice. If we are not, we will say so and name two who are.