Fronero is a Brisbane garden design and landscaping studio that has been reshaping tired backyards and acreage blocks since 2011, from design to planting.
Fourteen years on, the crew has grown to eighteen people, but every job still starts the same way. Someone walks the block, digs a hole, squeezes the soil to see how it holds water, and only then decides what to build. Design, construction, planting and long term care sit with the same team, so you are not chasing three different companies the first time something needs a closer look.
Day three on a terraced Chapel Hill block, before the turf went down.
Fronero began in 2011 with a rented corner of a shed in Salisbury and a single job booked for the spring. Marcus Ellery had spent the decade before that maintaining council parks across Brisbane, so he knew what local clay does when a summer storm dumps forty millimetres in an hour. The first client had a sloping Camp Hill backyard that turned into a swamp every February.
He fixed the drainage first, rebuilt the two failing retaining walls, then planted the whole slope with lomandra and westringia because they cope with wet feet and full sun. The neighbour across the fence asked for the same treatment three weeks later. That is roughly how the business grew, one fence line at a time, until word moved through Tarragindi, Ashgrove, Sherwood and out to the bayside at Wynnum.
First build, a flooded Camp Hill backyard that needed drainage before anything else.
Second crew added as maintenance clients outgrew one ute and one mower.
Moved into the South Brisbane workshop and started cutting our own sandstone.
Introduced water wise planting plans as standard on every design.
Six hundredth garden finished, a small courtyard in Bulimba.
Most landscaping quotes in Brisbane are guesswork dressed up in a spreadsheet. Ours are not, because we dig before we price. If the soil is wrong or the drainage runs the other way, you hear about it at step two, not halfway through the build.
We walk the block with you, check sun angles, look at where water pools and take a handful of soil to test how it drains. It takes about an hour and it costs nothing.
You get a scaled drawing, a plant list with botanical names and a short note explaining why each species suits your aspect, soil and how much time you actually want to spend gardening.
One number for the whole job, split into stages if you would rather spread the spend across two seasons. Paving, retaining, lighting and irrigation are quoted separately so you can cut something without losing the plan.
This is the part nobody photographs. Subsurface drainage, compacted base under paving, proper retaining footings. Get it wrong and no amount of nice planting will save the garden.
Soil conditioner, mulch, irrigation zones and plants set out at their mature spacing rather than crammed together to look full on handover day. We leave the site clean and take the spoil with us.
A printed schedule for watering, feeding and pruning through the first twelve months, plus a walk through the garden with the crew member who will look after it if you stay on a maintenance plan.
We do not sub the work out. The people who design your garden are the people who build it, and usually the same ones who keep it tidy a year later.
Survey, concept, planting plan, drainage, retaining walls, paving, turf and the build itself. Most Brisbane gardens take three to eight weeks on site, depending on how much hard landscaping you want and how long we spend waiting on weather.
See the full service
Fortnightly or monthly visits from a crew that already knows your garden, because in most cases we built it. Mowing, hedging, pruning, pest checks and feeding, with a short note afterwards about anything that needs watching.
See the full serviceEveryone on site is on the Fronero payroll. No unmarked utes, no strangers who have never seen your block before. If you get a regular maintenance visit, you will see the same two or three faces each time.
A handful of the jobs that changed the way the owners use their yard. Every one of them is within thirty minutes of South Brisbane.
We ask every client for a review a few months after handover, once the garden has been through a Brisbane summer and they know whether the drainage actually works.
"We had quotes from four companies and Fronero was the only one who got down and looked at the drainage before talking about plants. Two summers later the yard still drains, which is more than I can say for the previous thirty years."
"I look after nine rentals and Fronero handles the gardens on five of them. They send photos after every visit, invoice the same week, and my tenants have stopped ringing me about the lawns. That alone is worth the fee."
We keep a list of past clients who are happy to show people around. Pick a suburb, and we will arrange a visit at a time that suits them.
275 Grey Street, South Brisbane QLD 4101, Australia