Is your garden featureless, a blank canvas? Perhaps you’ve just moved a house with an uninteresting garden, and want to make it your own? Or maybe there’s an area of a garden you’ve lived with for years that needs changing? Although it may be frustrating to wait and not just charge headlong into the garden centre throwing everything into your trolley, stepping back and considering what you want and how to achieve it in the space you’ve got will help you get the most out of your space, and stop problems occurring later on.
Step 1. Get a feel for what you like. To do this, visit friend’s gardens and gardens open to the public. Weekends in spring and summer is the best time to do this, as many will be open, including village open garden schemes. Also look around the garden centre for inspiration. Take a pen, pad and camera with you, noting down and capturing what you like: water features; arrangements of beds and borders; paving and decking; patio containers; furniture; plants - whatever takes your fancy. Now think about what you want from this garden, making notes, and ask those who will share it with you their opinion too.
Step 2. Styles and themes. Unless you’re happy with an eclectic look, you may want to decide on a style and stick with it. Choose from broad styles such as Traditional, Contemporary, Urban, Formal, or narrower themes like Mediterranean, Gothic, or Cottage garden – search for these and more online to get a feel of how they should look. Now go through your photos and list of wants and needs, and see how they fit into the style or theme you’ve chosen – those ultra-modern plastic pots will look wrong in a traditional style garden. Visit the garden centre with a tape measure and record the dimensions of any paving, structures or other hard landscaping that you want.
Step 3. Plan it out. Measure the length and width of your garden, as well as any features you will be keeping (e.g. Trees, sheds, patio, paths). Get an A3 sized piece of paper, (squared is best), along with pencils, eraser and ruler, and draw the perimeter of your garden to the largest scale you can get on the paper. add all the permanent features you measured. Once this is all done, start drawing in lightly (you will have to erase several times) the outlines of any new areas of hard landscaping, including paved areas, water features, decking, arches, Gazebos as well as any garden buildings you want to put in, such as greenhouses or tool sheds. Next draw in the planting areas – beds, borders, raised beds, vegetable plots and any areas of new or existing lawn. Having the drawing to scale will give you an idea of what you can fit in – you may have to make sacrifices, and compromise is the key word here when weighing up what different people want from the garden.
Finally, add in the plants, trees and any large shrubs first, to the plan. Draw in a cross or circle where they are to be planted, with a larger circle around this, showing the eventual spread – look up heights and spreads for your chosen plants online if you don’t already have them. Fill in with smaller shrubs, perennials, grasses, ferns and alpines. Don’t forget to include any containers and the plants inside them.
After this, you are ready to put your plan into action, building in your hard landscaping first, followed by creation of borders, beds and lawns, finishing off with plants and containers.
