New garden- To excavate or not?

Hello,

I'm finally able to get my front garden and driveway done! Yeyyyy.

I know what hard landscaping we're having, but I'm really not sure what to do about what will be our planting areas - do i self dig it out, or ask the driveway guy to excavate it all and replace the soil?

I'll give you some background -

Right now we have a terrible condition Tarmac driveway down the left side of the house. We then have a cracked concrete, straight path down the side of the drive to the front door. Next to that is then a square patch of which is in front of our living room window. That's about 5m by 6m.

We're having all of the tarmac driveway, concrete path & concrete steps torn out with a digger.

We're then having a gravel driveway put in, framed with cobbles, in the same location as the current drive.

The path i have changed completely though - i want a curved cobble path. I want the garden to be more cottage like, for the path to add shape and interest and so that we can do some low maintenance planting and not need a lawn. Also it will be good to see who is coming up our path from the window! In my mind, this path will be lined by scented plants and interesting grasses. I'd like a rockery too, and a feature tree like a magnolia. Maybe some climbing wisteria over a gate pergola.

So i have moved this path so that the path gate is right in the middle of where our current square patch of lawn is, and it will curve its way over to the left where the front door and drive is.

Driveway man is going to have to dig in the lawn to put this path in. We're also having new fencing so he'll need to dig around the sides.

So logically, I should ask him to dig the whole front out? Is that a good idea though? There's loads of black bin bag mixed with the soil (I don't know why! Bad weed control idea!?) so I'm thinking he'll have to dig a few inches and the replace the soil.

But our soil is alkaline clay, if he puts normal top soil on from bulk bags will it cause us problems?

Or might it benefit us? I did really want grasses and lavender but they don't like our natural soil type. Wondering if we might have chance to 'correct' the soil?

Or am I better hand digging it all out myself before he comes, not going so deep and taking more care with remixing the soil? It would be great to try 'save' some of the plants if I can too - we've got peony plant and some lilac trees I could reuse.

I guess I feel a bit out of my depth, I'm a first time garden owner with not much gardening experience.

Any thoughts appreciated!

 

If giving it all over to plants, no lawn, i would have it removed, then you can buy a lorry load of top soil, cheaper than bags and have it tipped into place, ideally more than a few inches about a foot. If the lilac is large a skillful digger man, will be able to go round it, also any other large plants you want to leave where they are, then you can go round removing any soil left you don`t want. if you take up any shrubs, get your containers/trugs ready to put them in, if this is soon you can get the plants back in before they start growing full speed.

 

I'd be inclined to use the digger for the heavy ground work. It'll be quicker and lighten your workload as it's clay.