2010 May

How to Design Your Garden Part 1

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.

Simple but effective shapes

AVOID THIS!

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. In Part 2 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.

Don’t Want To Wait To Learn The Next Steps…

If you want to know the FastTrack, step-by-step method that will get you the results you want with your garden quickly and easily, then take a look at the Great Garden Formula Course…

Spring Garden Madness

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!

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 !