Turning Ideas Into Gardens – It All Starts With Seed
At Seed we believe that gardens are for living. We love working with clients to change how they live, relate and connect in the garden, improving families lives by having a garden that works for them. It gives me great joy and satisfaction to see how the garden experience for our family of clients is transformed and to be able to share my expression in the form of beautiful living spaces for people.
Gardens are dynamic, evocative, touchable spaces. Change your environment and you will be transported. We aim to provide value to our clients by guiding them to visualise and achieve a garden they absolutely love.
Seeds' director and principal designer is Donna Stanish. Donna graduated from Unitec in 1999 with a Diploma in Landscape Design and has been designing gardens for private homes and commercial clients while gaining knowledge and experience ever since.
A hands-on passionate gardener, I have been very fortunate to travel and visit cultural and historical gardens throughout the world.
Read about Donna in NZ Backyard and Garden Design Ideas magazine.
Please feel free to call and have a chat about how we can work together to create a world in your backyard.
Donna has done an excellent job of the landscaping of our new home. We are delighted with the result. She is professional in her approach and knowledgeable in her area of expertise. We felt we could rely on her advice and liked her suggestions. She was speedy in responding to our questions and she quickly gained our trust. We would not hesitate to recommend her services and will use her again when the situation arises. Anne
Our entire experience with Seed Landscapes was fantastic. Donna's expert advice was well appreciated. She is professional, clearly knows her trade, is prompt and clear with communication and is a lovely person. We needed our plants by a deadline and Donna achieved this making it an easy process. I dread to think of all the hours we spent at garden centres trying to organise the plants ourselves thinking it would save money - my advice... leave it to the experts at Seed Landscapes!!
Donna was very knowledgeable and pleasant to deal with. she took the time to understand our hopes for the garden and also consider the challenges facing its redesign. She set clear expectations, providing an excellent brief based on our initial conversation with her that aptly summarised our aspirations. her costs were comparable to other quotes we received. Donna linked us to a skilled and personable contractor who could carry out her design. She has answered a few miscellaneous email queries since which we appreciated. I recommended her to friends and they report similar experiences.
Donna, provided a very professional service assisting in getting us resource consent after an error in planning by our builders. She is an excellent communicator, and went the extra mile by discussing issues directly with the council and the builders to ensure her plans would offer what was needed.
We love her plans for the landscaping for our new home and would recommend her to anyone wanting a well thought out, creative and visually appealing job. She offered many tips on how we could save money by doing some of the work ourselves as well as offering to link us up with recommended companies to do the work for us. Thanks Donna!
Donna was great to work with. She produced plans for our proposed new deck in a timely manner - under a slightly tight timeframe too for added pressure! She was always punctual and pleasant to deal with. Her plan fits perfectly with our unusual space and limited budget. We're happy with the plans and can't wait for the project to begin and show her the finished masterpiece. Thanks Donna.
After many attempts and failures to landscape around our pool we decided to call an expert Donna Stanish. From our first meeting we felt relaxed and confident that we would end up with our perfect outdoor area. Donna listened to what we were saying and delivered an outstanding plant plan. The choice of palms and plants exceeded our expectation, now the planting is completed we are looking at very relaxing informal/formal garden that has completed the indoor outdoor flow of our colour scheme. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend Donna, she went the extra mile delivering palms with her husband on a Friday evening in Auckland traffic with family commitments pending. Such a lovely lady easy to talk and really does know her plants.
Donna from Seed Landscapes was fantastic to work with. We commissioned her to do a full design of our main garden and despite being a very tricky space with many challenges, Donna did the most amazing job.
We were impressed with the way she incorporated our requests into her design and unified the whole space with her incredible knowledge of trees and plants. She has so many wonderful ideas and industry contacts that bought the entire plan to life.
We can highly recommend Donna, she is talented, creative, professional and timely. We love our new garden! - Claire
This is an update following my initial review. Donna and her exceptionally talented gardener, Kyle, are continuing to directly maintain our garden. We are so happy (as are our neighbours, of course) as they are doing a simply wonderful job. Our maples and magnolias are particularly brilliant this spring, and Kyle brought my mother 6 myer lemons from the garden a week or so ago! Everything is starting to come into bloom, and we are really enjoying the garden awake before our eyes. If you want a fabulous landscaper, and a brilliant gardener, you need Donna and Kyle. I CANNOT RECOMMEND THEM HIGHLY ENOUGH. Following is my first review:
Donna is an absolutely fantastic landscape designer. She has a lovely warm manner and is incredibly 'in tune' with what people want for their gardens, but what sets her apart is that she is also the ultimate professional.
Her attention to detail is faultless, her in-depth knowledge of not just plants, flowers and trees, but also soil is exceptional. She turned our 'blasted heath/scorched earth' into a paradise.
My mother had some very specific requests including no hedges and no lawns, so she gave us some flowering screens, and a no-mow area, she gave us a veggie patch, a herb garden, and then the most amazing trees and pots.
All our neighbours have commented about how lovely our garden looks - I simply cannot rate Donna highly enough.
Donna is a very organised and professional Landscape Designer. She has transformed our dry & plain garden into an amazing Oriental outdoor garden.
We had a deadline to finish the majority of the works, Donna project managed her team and the contractors who did the job to a high standard. We are really happy with the great results and their thoughtful care for our family.
Donna is very easy to talk to and understands what we want. Her emails are always clear and straight forward. We are still receiving continuous garden maintenance services from Donna.
We highly recommend Donna to anyone who is looking for a true Landscape Designer for their garden!
100%
"From Donna's very first visit, we found her to be easy to understand and full of great vision and expertise knowledge of planting, lighting and a total feel for what a family desire from their space.
Her knowledge of the plants and lighting effects have transformed the day to evening feel with the mere flick of a switch.
We love every aspect of the back, side and front of our home. It has become a haven for everything from kids birthday parties , social barbeques and afternoon reading by the pool.
The planting has grown beyond our expectations and as the layers become more obvious as the months pass, we truly have a piece of the tropics in our very own Grey Lynn.
I would recommend Seed Landscapes without any hesitation and truly stand amazed at the transformation of our much treasured home."
We got exactly what we were hoping to from the visit with Donna so cannot thank her enough for sharing her time and thoughts with us. My partner and I had been discussing the works a lot recently and to be able to bounce those ideas off her was truly invaluable at the early stage of the project. We left the consultation really happy with the direction that we were heading in and will be in touch with her again shortly for stage 2. Thanks again for your assistance Donna.
We first engaged with Donna early in 2012 when we wanted to transform our dark, overgrown and uninspiring back garden and deck area.
We are not gardeners and we wanted something simple, elegant and easy to maintain. Donna's design exceeded all our expectations and the transformation was more than we could have hoped for.
Now, 6 years on after enjoying our lovely deck, patio and garden area, we are renovating and extending our house which means we have to redesign the deck and garden. We didn't hesitate to enlist Donna again and we feel confident that she will once again create the perfect space.
100% Donna was very personable and easy to deal with. Ours was not an easy job - time dragged out and layout changed from original. She was patient with the changes and communicated well with other parties (eg. builder). She also put in a lot of effort to ensure we were clear on the plant choices and layout. She anticipated well with respect to the sorts of things we would like and fitted the plants and layout with the style of the house.
When asked for specific features she responded 100% appropriately with great solutions. The plants she sourced for us appear to have been of good quality (early days yet, but no failures and plenty of blooms).
Her communications via phone, text and email were timely and comprehensive. I would happily recommend Donna to friends." – Frances
Not being gardeners the task of re-planting an overgrown 2000sq metre property was slightly overwhelming. Donna from Seed was tasked with creating us a planting plan that we could chip away with in stages on our timeframe. We are absolutely thrilled with her design. Donna even sourced and arranged delivery of our plants. Such a lovely balance of colour and texture we have no hesitation in recommending Donna for your landscaping project. You won’t be disappointed.
We met Donna at Seed Landscapes at a very stressful time. She guided us to a great solution which was completely different to any we came up with and much better. She considers the whole picture of an outdoor space - usage, people, potential future use, plants, hard surfaces. We would not hesitate to recommend Donna to anyone, her breadth of experience was great. We have a site with heritage restrictions and she took the hassle from us and made it appear easy. Donna is a very good communicator and managed mine and my husband's views very effectively, honestly and diplomatically. Thanks Seed Landscapes.
It was really enjoyable working with Donna to re-design our garden. Her experience and knowledge, together with her enthusiasm, resulted in an excellent job. We are delighted with the outcome and the impact it has on our outdoor living.
Choosing Donna was easy for us to create a comprehensive design for our home here at Omaha: we know and ADMIRE her work. We wanted our new comprehensive garden to be the “icing on the cake” enhancing the recent up-spec of our home. Our brief was a stylish, weather resilient, little fuss, drought tolerant garden. Donna’s expertise has delivered. We had to have the special statement “Dr Seuss” Podocarpus - our outdoor art forms which we will delight seeing come into their full glory in the years ahead. Highly recommend.