If you hire a typical landscape contractor listed in your local phone book, chances are they will not charge you for the costs involved in developing a design. However, they also will not give or sell you a design alone. Most landscapers will only provide you with a design if you agree to have their company install it for you. Another reason many landscape contractors will not sell or charge for a design is that they do not formally prepare a specific design for each customer. Very often a landscaper will have a general idea of what he or she wants to do for their client, but they don't worry about the details until they visit the nursery they buy their plants from.
Most landscapers buy virtually all of their plants from one or two nurseries.
As such, they base their designs around the plants that their favorite nurseries have in stock. Since landscape contractors typically do not directly charge their customers for the time it takes them to buy the plants they are planting, they don't waste a lot of time searching for the perfect plant. The result is often a design that looks like it was made with a cookie-cutter, very undistinguishable from the neighbors. Deer are just about everywhere. As the human population has moved into wooded areas, problems with the native deer eating your garden are becoming more and more prevalent.