Post Construction Establishment

Why new landscapes fail in year one

A newly installed landscape is at its most vulnerable in the first twelve months, and that is exactly when attention drops off, because the project is finished and the invoice is paid.

The plants have almost no root system relative to their canopy. Until that changes they are entirely dependent on being watered correctly, and the correct schedule is nothing like the long term one.

The most common failure is handing a new landscape to a standard maintenance schedule immediately. That schedule was designed for established planting, and it is wrong in both directions: too infrequent for new plants, and it stays wrong because nobody flagged the difference.

The second most common is cutting water at the end of the first summer, because the planting looks established. It is not.

A new landscape handed to a standard maintenance schedule is being watered for plants that do not exist yet.

The establishment schedule, in writing

The single document that decides whether an installation survives is an establishment watering schedule with a step down, and most projects do not produce one.

It should state what happens in months one to three, four to six, and seven to twelve, and name the point where the planting transitions to the normal programme.

Trees need their own line, because their establishment period is longer than shrubs and their failure is more expensive. Two to three years of deliberate watering is the realistic figure, not one season.

Without a written schedule, the watering quietly becomes whatever the controller was already doing, which is how a well designed installation dies from a scheduling decision nobody made.

Warranty, and who is responsible for what

Plant warranties are common on installation contracts and they contain a condition that decides most claims: the plants have to have been maintained properly.

Where the installer also maintains the landscape through establishment, that question does not arise. Where a different company takes over immediately, every failure becomes an argument about whether it was installation or care.

That argument is avoidable. Either keep the installer on for the establishment period, or agree in writing what the maintenance obligations are and record that they were met.

The record is what settles it. Watering schedule as run, dates of any changes, and photographs at intervals. Without those, a warranty claim comes down to two opinions.