When you begin planning a new garden, you need to consider the design basics like the theme, colour and scent very carefully.
What plants will work in your garden? Do you have any spots perfect for a herb/veggie bed? You’ll need to understand plant lifecycles in order to design your new garden effectively. Before you even think about planting, you need to create a plan for your garden. You can do this by using graph paper and drawing a plan of your garden site to scale.
As you design your garden with graph paper, you might want to use a measuring tape to get approximate measurements, and try to indicate areas of sun and shade. Once you’ve completed this drawing, you can continue to add elements to your garden plan:
- Find pictures that inspire you.
- Make a list of your main goals and limitations.
- Study your current plan and decide which features you definitely want to incorporate into your final plan.
- Now you can use tracing paper to sketch over your draft plan and sketch in or leave out features and designs.
- In general, you don’t have to put in too much detail when designing this plan, like going as far as listing every plant by name. You could simply write down ‘purple and yellow flower bed’, or something similar to get an idea of what you want there.
- There are many different themes you can choose from, all of which create an impact in their own way. You could go for a formal yet simple garden, an Asian style garden, a tropical garden, a dry climate garden, or a woodland garden - the choice is yours!
Now that you’ve designed your garden, you can decide which area you’d like to start with and get to work. Break the big projects down into manageable pieces, and do them one at a time. This will make the whole thing much more bearable for you.
Just like rooms in a house, the garden has 4 major elements. Going from the ground up is best, so you will probably find it helpful to do things in this order:
- Floor: sort out the grass, paving materials, and soil.
- Walls: this could be the walls of your house, a hence, hedge, trellis, or a backdrop of shrubs/evergreens.
- Ceiling: many simply have the open sky, but you can also choose an umbrella, overarching tree, or something else you like the look of.
- Furniture: tables and chairs will be needed for social seating in your garden, but consider containers like modern looking planters and ornaments too.
- Try not to take it over the top with garden gnomes and other accessories. Limit these to around 2 ornaments and keep the focus on living parts of your garden.
Now you know the basics of designing your brand new garden, go ahead and get creative with your graph paper. You can let us know how your garden turned out in the comments!