Expanding the Bramley Apple Story

A much‑admired colleague and mentor told me years ago that if I wanted a successful garden design business, I needed to spend 60% of my time working on the business and only 40% actually designing. At the time I wasn’t entirely convinced. Now, after the last few years, I can safely say he was absolutely right.

After fifteen wonderful years designing gardens in Hampshire, Bramley Apple Garden Design reached a natural point of growth. Many of our clients were already coming from further afield, and I found myself increasingly drawn to opportunities in Hertfordshire and the surrounding counties. So when the chance came to relocate to Bishop’s Stortford, it wasn’t a goodbye to Hampshire, it was an expansion.

Of course, expansion comes with its quirks. Google wouldn’t let me pin our business to a private address, and being perched on the Hertfordshire–Essex–Cambridgeshire border meant my service area suddenly looked a little… geographically creative. But with a background in marketing, I leaned into local advertising, reached out to fellow members of the Association of Professional Landscapers, and joined the local cluster group. Those relationships were invaluable. Based on my established reputation Landscape contractors were happy to recommend me in my new area, and a couple of years on, I’m now able to return the favour, sending clients their way and building a strong, reliable network that benefits everyone involved, particularly the client.

The other half of modern marketing is social media and the website. And my poor website… well, after seven years it was on its knees. It couldn’t take another project upload, which is not ideal when you’re expanding into a new region and trying to attract fresh clients. It was the classic chicken‑and‑egg situation: you need new work to justify investing in the website, but you need the website to attract the new work.

Eventually I took the plunge. I worked with the brilliant team at Web Goddess, moved the site to a new platform, refreshed the design, and added all the latest projects. It was absolutely worth it.

Then SketchUp decided to join the party. The new features were fantastic but my three‑year‑old Mac simply couldn’t cope. Storage maxed out, performance dropped, and suddenly I was buying a new Mac on top of everything else. Running your own business is nothing if not unpredictable.

But here’s the thing: a business needs investment. It needs nurturing, updating, refreshing; just like a garden. Now I have a beautiful new website and a fast and shiny Mac that makes creating 3D visuals a joy. I have also invested in a brilliant new plug‑in that streamlines planting plans, and a surveying tool that’s perfect for smaller projects where a full topo isn’t necessary.

And despite the stress, the admin, the endless “behind the scenes” work, I genuinely love running my own business. I love the clients we get to work with, both long‑standing Hampshire clients and new Hertfordshire, Essex and Cambridgeshire clients, and the gardens I get to create. Bramley Apple Garden Design hasn’t moved so much as it has grown, and it’s exciting to see where that growth will take us next.