I’ve just returned from Spain where we finished planting the Courtyard Garden. You may remember at Easter, we put in the bones of the planting scheme. By bones I mean the main feature plants, the ones that add permanent structure and form the backdrop to the softer, flowering plants. Well, now we have just put in the flowering star performers.
If you are new here and want to see how it all began, watch the garden design process video.
The Main Focus
The job of any plant in the garden is to add beauty and wow factor. The plants are the icing on the ‘well-designed’ cake. Getting the planting scheme right from small garden is really tricky. The lack of space means you have to be really careful with your choice of plant.
How To Think Big in a Small Garden
With a large garden, you have plenty of room to add as many plants as you like and experiment with different varieties of your favourite plants. In a small garden the lack of space makes every choice of plant critical. Every plant you put in a small garden, must really earn its place there. So how do you choose?
Important things to think about are how the plant looks all year round, but how big it gets and how good it looks next to the plants surrounding it. For this Spanish courtyard garden, we want to create a tropical flowering jungle look.
Size Does Matter!
Although we have tried to be careful with the size of the plants that we put in, in order to create a jungle effect we have put in a few plants that get larger than the space we have allocated them, so some things will need to be pruned regularly to stop them from becoming too enormous. Hopefully we’ve got the right balance between jungle and correct plant spacing. It is very easy to get carried away and put in too many plants, not allowing them to grow to full size.
Choose Plants That Create The Look You Want
We’ve chosen a selection of plants primarily for their foliage and architectural qualities. Things like palm trees and phormiums makes for wonderful shapes and all year interest. And in between these architectural specimen plants we’ve planted lots of flowering perennials and annuals to fill in the gaps. The enormous pink flowers are Hibiscus bushes.
My parents have got a little bit carried away with the amount of bedding plants that have gone in to fill the gaps, but all in all I’m very pleased with how the garden has turned out (I’m pretty certain there is no room now for the threatened pansies and daffodils! – big sigh of relief!). Later in the year we will be repeating the use of the blue Agapanthus. Repeating some of the plants around the garden adds more clarity to the scheme.
Choose The Right Plants For The Conditions
Because the planting borders are essentially containers, we’ve installed a drip irrigation watering system. This is the most efficient way to water plants without wasting valuable water reserves. There’s a pipe connected to a timer that feeds the water for two minutes, every three days, via tiny offshoot pipes to each plant. We’ve chosen plants that can cope with the heat and minimal water. But even so, until they are established they will need to be watered regularly.
What Do You Want To Know?
I’ll be writing lots more on how to do successful planting schemes in future blog posts. What do you struggle with the most when it comes to choosing plants for your garden? Let me know in the comments or drop me an email. And there will be some free goodies coming your way very soon!
Next time we’ll take a look at how you can give your garden a makeover this Summer Holiday.
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In part one, we looked at where to start with planning your garden. If you’ve followed steps 1 to 7, you’re now ready to go onto stage two, the planning.
It’s taken me a little longer than I would have liked to get part two to you. I’ve been busy driving the graphic designers that are putting the finishing touches on the Great Garden Formula Course, insane… I am a bit picky with finishing details! Anyway, let’s now get back to how to plan your garden part two.
What to do now
Now that you have your base plan, showing the position of all the trees, features, and existing plants you want to keep in your garden, you are now ready to start designing. The way to do a good design is to concentrate on the shape. When I say shape, I don’t mean the shape of your existing garden. I mean the shape of the empty spaces within it. If you think about it, the majority of your garden is empty space. Your lawn and patio area constitute empty space, and the shrub borders and features form solid areas.
How you shape the empty areas of space (your lawn and patio area) are the key to creating a really well-designed garden. Rather than concentrate on things like features and individual plants, instead think about what shape your new lawn and patio will be.
Action steps
- On your base plan, start to draw some geometric shapes, like circles, squares, rectangles, any easy geometric shape to represent your lawn and patio areas. These shapes should fill approximately two-thirds of your garden plan.
- Once you’ve chosen a shape that you like for your lawn and patio, the areas that are left over are going to be the shapes of your planting borders. If planting borders feel too large, you may then need to add some additional features to use up the space, so that it isn’t all planting.
- Make the shapes you’ve chosen lead your eye from one side of the garden to the other. This will create a sense of movement, and will make your garden feel much larger and more interesting.
- When you are happy with the shape of the empty spaces, it is then time to add the planting and any features you wish to include in your design.
Below, is the plan of the narrow garden shown in the photograph above. The red line that zigzags down the garden, shows how the position of the rectangle and circular shapes lead the eye from one side of the garden to the other, thus making it look wider.
Garden Shapes & Movement
It may feel counterintuitive to design the empty areas of your garden first but this is the best way to make sure that your design flows and works well as a whole unit. Most people, when they design a garden, put a feature here and something somewhere else, and then stand back and wonder why the garden doesn’t look as good as they’d hoped. The reason it doesn’t look good is because nothing links together. If you just design in little areas, your garden will never look as good as it will if you design a garden as a whole entity.
It is really important to concentrate on what shape lawn and patio areas you have first, and then you can embellish your design with nice features and planting schemes. Planning your garden this way round will ensure you of success.
The Great Garden Formula – Beginner’s Step by Step Guide To Garden Planning
Very shortly, I will be releasing a new downloadable mini-course, which covers the design process in much more detail. The course will contain the design formula I use every time I design. The Great Garden Formula is the beginners step-by-step guide to planning your garden. If you’d like to be notified when it becomes available, please enter your e-mail address below. The first 10 people who buy the mini course will get it at a significant discount in return for feedback testimonials for the website.
There will be several mini-courses in this series concentrating on how to do the perfect planting plan, what to do if you have a small garden and want to make it look bigger, how to deal with changes in level and sloping gardens, and also how to design an awkward shaped garden. If there is a particular problem you have with your garden, please let me know in the comments or by e-mail. And if you have an issue that isn’t already covered in one of the mini-courses , you’ll win a free course as a thank you.
Enter your e-mail address below if you want to be notified when the mini courses become available. Don’t worry, I won’t spam you!
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Your outside space can be as much of a curse as it is a blessing if you don’t know what to do with it. And even if you do know exactly what you want, how do you go about achieving it? Well, let’s start at the beginning.
Where and How Do You Start to Plan Your Garden?
A few of you smart folks might be thinking that it all depends on what you have in the garden already. You’re sort of right and sort of wrong. In some respects, it really doesn’t matter what you already have there. What matters is your like or dislike of what’s there now and it’s usefulness.
I should explain more about usefulness just in case you are wondering if plants and features need to double up as multifunction devices in their spare time. They don’t. ‘Useful’ refers to what whatever is there now does for the flow and function of the garden – sorry, I’ve slipped into meaningless designer babble. What I mean to say, is everything in the right place?
How Do You Know What Is Right And What Isn’t?
Good question. Glad you asked. Now here’s where we get to the crux of it all. The REALLY important part. Those of you who read my ode to Star Trek (the key to a great garden) will be way ahead – it’s space. That’s the important part, or more correctly, what you do with it.
Specifically, it’s how you define the ‘empty’ areas of space (usually lawn, patio or gravel) in your garden. These ‘empty’ areas will dictate how the garden is viewed, how it functions and, most importantly, how good the garden looks. As a general rule, wiggly edged lawn with bits nibbled out here and there don’t look anywhere near as good as big bold shapes like ovals, circles and interlocking rectangular shapes.
Use Geometric Shapes like Circles, Ovals, Rectangles for Your Design
Avoid Wiggly Line Shapes
Here’s How You Plan A Garden:
- Work out what you want to have in your garden. Do this by looking at lots of garden pictures. There are some on the garden ideas page of this website.
- Measure your garden – if you don’t know how to do that, there just happens to be some video tutorials that show you exactly how to do it. If you can’t be bothered to measure your garden, then read this enlightening article and then decide if that’s quite such a good game plan.
- Plot on your base plan all of your existing stuff like trees, shrub borders, patio, paths, that you think you’ll most likely keep. Your base plan will need to be to scale. Scale really isn’t as scary as it sounds and is explained step by step in how to draw your garden to scale video.
- Next, pick a shape. Any shape but preferably one you like and preferably an easy shape. Start with a circle or a square and draw that in the centre of your garden.
- Keep it simple. How many shapes you use will depend on the size of your garden. To start with, just try one big one taking up approx two-thirds of your garden. Don’t worry if there are things in the way just draw your shape over the top.
- Here’s where you decide if things are in the right place. Take a look at the things that are encroaching into the shape you’ve just drawn. Is the shrub border that randomly juts out really working with your newly defined ‘space’ shape? If it isn’t, can you adjust its shape to improve its relationship to the shape you’ve just drawn? If it still doesn’t work, can you take out whatever it is that is encroaching?
- Be objective. Try not to get too emotionally attached to the outcome and worry about each plant being right or wrong. If something doesn’t ‘work’, it doesn’t necessarily mean it has to come out. You do however, need to be aware something is ‘wrong’ in order to fix it. So no cheating, be objective. We’ll look at how you get round problems in the next post.
So, that’s where you start. Next time we’ll take a look at how you develop your simple shape into a workable garden design. Oh, and if there is nothing at all in your back garden, then you just do points 1-4, and sit back with a smug look on your face as you have no ‘does it stay, does it go?’ decisions to make.
What Frustrates You The Most With Your Garden?
I’ve almost finished writing the book that covers in depth the successful garden design formula I use on a daily basis. The book also includes a whole host of cunning tricks I’ve developed over the years that speed up the design process. I’d like to make sure I’ve covered everything you’re likely to need to know, so just to make sure can you tell me what you’ve had the most trouble with when trying to work out how to do your garden?
Prize Time
If you can think of something that I haven’t included that makes the grade, you’ll win a copy of the new book. And you’ll get your hands on it before anyone else! So leave your tales of woe in the comments section to enter and win yourself a copy of The Great Garden Formula – a step-by-step guide to creating a well designed garden.
This could be your only opportunity in life to moan and be rewarded for it! So leave your comments below now.
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For me, it’s the silly season. We are working flat out, trying to get gardens done in time for summer. If you’ve joined The Great Garden Challenge forum then you’ll have seen just how many gardens we’ve built in the last few weeks on the ‘work in progress page‘. One recently, more or less finished garden, featured in the forum is the now infamous Spanish Courtyard…
Progress Report – Spanish Courtyard Garden
These are the updated photos of the garden which was featured in the garden design video tutorials. There are still a few plants left to put in but it’s coming together nicely. The water feature is somewhat bigger than I was told it would be, but apparently it looks in proportion when you are in the garden!
If you want to see more photos, then sign into The Great Garden Challenge Forum – it’s free and you can take a look at all our other projects as well as include your own garden as you develop it.
How’s The Landscape Man Doing?
Despite being rushed off my feet, I have still found time to watch Channel 4′s Landscape Man. Tonight’s episode was another interesting one. The client’s budget was £250,000.
I’ve been writing about the importance of design when planning a garden and this week I had high hopes because they had a real live designer involved! Yay, at last. Trouble is he didn’t come across as overly effective. He was so busy with his Chelsea Flower Show preparations, that he had to let the client’s get on with it half way through.
They didn’t seem to mind that much but even so, I didn’t feel it was the best advert for designers. I was also left feeling that they’d spent an awful lot of money with not a great deal to show for it. Yes the terrace was nice and the large specimen trees were beautiful but I found myself asking ‘Why?’ a lot throughout the programme.
Screenshot Ch4 Landscape Man - Main terrace
Why?
Putting a modern, ex-Chelsea, show garden in part of the garden, close to that style of house didn’t ever seem like it was going to turn out well…
To me, it just didn’t feel like the design flowed coherently. The pleached hornbeams didn’t seem to do a lot, other than be really out of proportion with the width to height ratio of the path they surrounded. It looked uncomfortable. I did like their metal pergola though, that was very nice.
Screenshot Ch4 Landscape Man - Pleached Hornbeam - tad too high?
I’m a great believer in putting things in the garden for good reasons. They created a ‘stumpery’ (if that’s how you spell it) which is basically dead tree roots with ferns planted in. Ok, interesting idea but why? It didn’t really do anything for the look and feel of the garden.
Screenshot Ch4 Landscape Man - 'Stumpery'
I am looking forward to next week’s show though. If you read the comments on the review I did on the first Landscape Man programme, you’ll have read Ed’s comments. His garden is next in line to be shown in the series and they had to cope with a very overgrown 4 1/2 acre site on the south coast of Guernsey. The garden is lashed by strong coastal winds, so they have had to create a garden that works with harsh conditions.
Everything Should Earn Its Place In Your Garden
If you are in the midst of planning your garden and have lots of creative ideas, sit with them for a little while to make sure they are really right for your garden. Random ideas never work well, it’s really important that features tie in well with everything else in the garden.
What Aspects Of Your Garden Can I Help You With?
I’m planning ahead what I write about on the blog, so I’d like to know what type of garden you have and where you are stuck with it? Let me know if there is something in particular you’d like some advice on. If you don’t, I’ll only keep writing about Landscape Man!
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