Execution and commissioning: turning a park drawing into a built garden.

Earthwork and grading, then drainage and buried services including irrigation and electrical conduit, then hardscape and edging, then soil and planting, then the establishment period. Planting before services is the most common and most expensive sequencing error on a park site.

The defined period after planting during which the contractor waters, weeds, replaces failures and completes snagging before the garden is handed over. It is what converts a planted site into a functioning garden, and it should be a priced, time-bound part of the contract rather than an informal understanding.

By specifying species, size, container grade and hardening status, then inspecting stock at the nursery and again on arrival, and rejecting material that does not meet it. Root-bound, unhardened or wrongly identified plants brought onto site are difficult to argue about after they are planted.

It should be. Garden soil is often the largest unseen variable in a park contract, and poor soil undermines everything planted in it. Texture, organic content, pH, salinity and freedom from weed seed, debris and contamination are worth verifying before spreading rather than after.

Planting is timed to the season (for most Indian sites, at the onset of or during the monsoon) so establishment runs on natural rainfall. The construction programme is planned backwards from that window, since hardscape and services can be built in any season but planting cannot.

As-built drawings including buried services, the plant schedule as actually planted, irrigation system details and operating instructions, warranties on equipment, and a maintenance manual setting out the regime the garden needs. Without the as-built service drawings, the first maintenance excavation becomes guesswork.

It depends on what the contract says. Typically failures within the establishment or defects period are replaced by the contractor, and thereafter responsibility sits with whoever holds the maintenance contract. Making that boundary explicit at contract stage avoids the most common post-handover dispute.