Most bad gardens are not built badly. They are built without a plan. A landscaper turns up, prices a vague idea off the back of a quote form, and starts digging. The drainage is an afterthought, the retaining wall holds two metres of someone else's lawn on no engineering, and the planting is whatever was on the trailer that morning. A year later the lawn floods, the wall leans, and half the plants are dead. The owner paid twice: once for the work, once to fix it.

Hazel Brennan started Fernline in 2013 after a decade designing coastal gardens, because she was tired of being called in to redraw work that should have been drawn first. Joel, her partner and the licensed builder, had spent the same years rebuilding other people's failures. The studio they built together does the obvious thing the industry skips: it designs the whole garden on paper, costs it line by line, and only then builds it.

A garden fails on paper long before it fails in the ground. So we get the paper right.

Today Fernline covers design, full construction, decks and pergolas, retaining walls, native and coastal planting, garden makeovers, and grounds care for homes and strata across the Northern Beaches. There is no travel surcharge within 15km of Mona Vale, and anything beyond it is a named line on the proposal, never a surprise.