Ground first, green last: Ireland's landscaping and groundworks pipeline, as told by the planning register

No building goes up without the ground being opened first, and almost no permission is signed off without a landscaping plan at the end. That makes groundworks and landscaping the two bookends of the construction programme, and both are written into the planning application months before a contractor is on site: in the description of works, in the drawings, and in the conditions attached to the grant.

Read across every council in the twelve months from 1 September 2025, the register tagged 5,057 applications for landscaping and 2,174 for groundworks and enabling works, with a further 217 for drainage and flood works. Of the landscaping applications, 778 are on site now and 1,817 are granted and waiting to start; across all open records there are 12,255 live landscaping leads. For groundworks, 427 are on site, 944 are granted, and 5,217 are live.

The two maps are different. Landscaping follows housing density: Dublin City leads with 842 applications, then Fingal 449, Kildare 346, Dun Laoghaire Rathdown 345 and Meath 345. Groundworks follows ground: Cork leads with 210, ahead of Dublin City 193, Dun Laoghaire Rathdown 124, Kerry 117 and Meath 103. Hills, rock and rural sites put Cork and Kerry near the top of the groundworks table and nowhere near the top of the landscaping one.

Trade tags say which applications carry the work. The descriptions say what the work is. In the same twelve months, 589 applications named hard or soft landscaping outright, led by Dublin City with 141, Fingal 60 and South Dublin 42. 424 named drainage or SuDS elements such as swales and attenuation, again led by Dublin City (132) and Fingal (70). 163 named retaining walls, led by Cork (24) and Donegal (16). 87 named the importation of soil and stone for land improvement or reclamation, led by Cork, Meath and Waterford. 70 named berms or bunds, led by Cork (13) and Meath (7). 42 named earthworks, site levelling or raised ground levels, led by Donegal, Wicklow and Clare.

At the large end, the landscaping package is a contract in its own right. The Adamstown SDZ Phase 2 Boulevard scheme carries hard and soft landscaping across 886 homes. The Boherboy, Saggart LRD from Kelland Homes Ltd. and Evara Developments Ltd. was granted in February 2026 for 611 homes. Fingal's 530-home LRD at Swords and Meath's LRD at Dunboyne North, granted in May 2026 with SuDS written in, sit in two of the five councils that lead the landscaping table. In Kerry, phased staff lodges near Killarney name extensive landscaping and earthworks in the same breath.

A distinct stream of applications has no house, shed or unit in it. It is ground: importing inert soil and stone to raise land, restore it or bring it back into farming. In Laois, an application to raise low-lying land for agricultural use with imported inert soil and stone and recontouring was declared invalid; earlier applications for the same works at the same site sit beside it on the register. In Waterford, a scheme to restore a disused 3.52 ha rock and gravel quarry to agricultural use with imported inert soil and stone, citing Article 27 by-products, was also declared invalid. In Galway, an extension of previously permitted land improvement works is lodged and due a decision on 1 October.

For a haulier or earthmoving contractor these are volume jobs measured in loads, not square metres, and the register shows them from the first attempt. Invalid applications are usually corrected and lodged again, so a closed file is a site to watch rather than a dead one. Schemes of this kind may also need a waste permit or Article 27 by-product status alongside planning; that is a matter for the applicant and their advisers.

The biggest single source of small groundworks and landscaping jobs in Ireland is the rural one-off home. Of 2,987 new single homes granted in the twelve months from 1 September 2025, 2,636, or 88%, were outside every CSO urban area. The rural share runs highest in Kilkenny (96%), Galway County (94%), Tipperary (92%) and Mayo (91%). By count, Cork County leads with 421, then Donegal 361, Galway County 268, Mayo 185 and Clare 170.

Each one is a site strip, a foundation, a driveway, a treatment system and a percolation area before a block is laid, and sometimes more: one Donegal grant this year covers the retention of ground excavation and levelling alongside a new house, and a Louth one-off house was granted with its ground levels raised to match the neighbouring sites. (Private homes are described here, never linked: the brief names organisations only.)

At the other end, rural grants commonly carry a landscaping condition. Typical wording, from An Bord Pleanala order ABP-321259-24: 'The site shall be landscaped, using only indigenous deciduous trees and hedging species, in accordance with details which shall be submitted to, and agreed in writing with, the planning authority prior to commencement of development.' Many add a replacement clause, as in PL04.247747: 'Any plants which die, are removed or become seriously damaged or diseased, within a period of five years from the completion of the development, shall be replaced within the next planting season.' Where the condition is attached, that is a native-hedging order on the site, with five years of aftercare work behind it.

Building control commencement notices show when rural one-off homes actually go on site. From September 2025 to September 2026 the monthly count ran 282, 308, 184, 189, 191, 290, 285, 372, 372, 395, 339, 282 and 354: a winter trough from November to January and a spring peak from April to June. Groundworks follow a commencement at once, so the notice is the groundworks start date.

Landscaping runs on a different clock. Bare-root hedging and trees go in from mid-November to March, so the planting for a house started in spring 2026 falls due at the first planting season after it is finished. Hedgerow work carries its own dates too: the Wildlife Act restriction on cutting hedgerows runs from 1 March to 31 August, with an exemption for clearing vegetation in the course of construction on a permitted site. Put together, this spring's 1,139 starts are this winter's and next winter's planting.

All of this is filterable on PlanningLeads. The landscaping, groundworks and enabling, and drainage and flood verticals isolate the applications that carry each trade; the on-site-now timing filter shows the jobs that have started; alerts send new matches by council as they are lodged; and the map's area layers show where the rural and urban pipelines sit. The trade window model estimates when, between commencement and completion, each package is most likely to be bought.

For landscape contractors, garden designers and nurseries, PlanningLeads for landscapers sets that up in one place. For groundworks, earthmoving and haulage firms, start at PlanningLeads for groundworks.