Ben Parrot – Bio

Founder & Landscape Gardener

The outdoors came first. Long before any of this was a business I was out walking as a boy, and what stuck with me was never really the view. It was the ground. Scree slopes, dry stone walls holding back a hillside, the way water always finds its own route down. That turned into gardening – beginning with an orchid collection before I was 9 years old – gardening turned into landscaping, and somewhere in there I saw the practical beauty of decorative aggregates: stones, bark and aggregates that look good and do a job at the same time, which is rarer in a garden than people think.

Fifteen years later that is still the dream. Driveways, patios, paths and edging, drainage and soakaways, rockeries, water features, play areas, mulching and soil. I have built all of it, fixed a fair bit of other people's, and got plenty wrong myself along the way. The getting it wrong matters more than it sounds. The wrong depth on a sub-base, a membrane skipped in the one place it was actually holding the ground together, a grade of stone that looked right in the photo and shifted under the first proper test. I paid for those at my own expense, and aside from the extensive research I have done as a perpetual student of landscaping, they are the reason I can tell you which corner is safe to cut and what will come back to bite you a couple of winters later.

I started selling landscaping supplies because I wanted to offer the UK the widest range of garden aggregates and stones, all in the one place. I started writing the guides because I got tired of hearing back the stuff that my old customers read. Coverage depths quoted with no mention of soil type, generic ‘advertorial-type’ AI slop in the same handful of sentences reworded across a dozen sites by people who have clearly never built a gravel path.

So Outdoor Aggregates does both jobs: we sell the best quality materials directly, and I write how-to content that reflects what happens in real life whilst sharing inspirational ideas to help people make their own version of serenity, right in their own garden. If a page here tells you how deep to lay a sub-base or which gravel holds on a slope, it is because I laid a sub-base and watched gravel move.

I read the customer emails myself too, and a fair few of these articles started life as an answer to something somebody asked us first.

There are things I stay out of. Anything electrical around a water feature or garden lighting goes to a qualified electrician, and drainage touching a foul or septic system is outside what I will advise on. I would rather point you at the right trade than guess.

So, if you are looking to renovate your outdoor space, do-it-yourself style, or you want to know exactly what needs to happen before you hire a professional who is going to charge you a bucket load of money, Outdoor Aggregates is the place.

Get in touch here.