Every garden project starts with the existing situation, and measuring it has always been the least loved part of the job: two people, a tape measure, a windy afternoon and a sketch that needs deciphering back at the office. Digital surveying with GPS replaces that with one person, a receiver on a pole and a drawing that is finished when the measuring is.
How it works in a garden
A GNSS receiver such as the UNI-GR2 converts satellite signals into centimetre-accurate positions. You walk the garden and record boundaries, facades, existing trees and height differences as points, lines and polygons in the UNI-Collect app. The measurement loads directly into your drawing software, so the design starts on real dimensions.
It works the other way around too. Once the design is approved, you stake it out from the drawing: the organic curve of a pond or a border goes from screen to soil point by point, without a string line in sight. The excavator operator digs to the centimetre from the same drawing.
Fair is fair: in a dense urban garden squeezed between buildings, satellite reception has its limits and the tape measure keeps its place. But in a medium-sized garden with trees, gardener Rick Veeken tested our system for a week alongside a rival system, and found ours “a lot easier to work with” than the other one. He also expected his staff to be able to work with it without extensive instruction. He bought the system after the test.
Why gardeners adopt it
The time gain is the obvious part: measuring faster, no retyping, staking out without improvising. The quieter gain is professionalism. A quote built on measured surfaces and volumes is a quote you can defend, and a client who sees the design staked out exactly as drawn stops second-guessing the invoice.
Several landscaping companies went before you. Read how Hoveniersbedrijf Van Antwerpen works more accurately through digital surveying and how Fons Linders Tuinmeesters steckt seine Entwürfe einfach ab.
Working with garden design software? Survey data from UNI-Collect loads into drawing packages, including the garden-specific ones such as garDsign.
A concrete example
Say a landscaper takes on a 2,000 m² garden with mature trees. One employee measures the whole plot in a morning, trees included. The designer works on real positions, the client walks through a design that fits the actual garden, and during construction the pond and paths are staked out straight from the drawing. No surprises during the build, and the calculation matched reality from day one.
Erste Schritte
You need one set: receiver, app, cloud environment and RTK corrections, together in das UNI-Collect-Umfragepaket. No surveying background required; if you can use a smartphone, you can measure a garden.
Want to try it in one of your own gardens first? Contact us for a demo.