I’ve come to sunny southern Spain to do my writing (the warm weather is essential for good writing, you know!). The next ebook and mini-course are called How to Design a Small Garden.

Would You Like Rachel to Design Your Garden at a Discounted Price?

Now, whilst I do have many existing examples of small gardens, it would be nice to have some brand-new gardens featured in the new ebook that haven’t been in any other course. So, I have a special offer for anyone who has a small garden that they would like to have designed.…

The offer is this: anyone who commissions a small garden design from the newly launched postal design service here at Successful Garden Design will get a £75 reduction of  the cost, providing I can use the design in the new ebook and mini-course. You’ll also get a copy of the new ebook when it’s finished, if your garden has been selected for inclusion.

The postal garden design service is already heavily discounted from my regular garden design consultation over at ORIGIN garden design because it is all done remotely, with photos and site plans you provide, and no site visits involved.

I start writing the new ebook in June, so please contact me before 11th June with photographs and dimensions of your garden. There are only 5 slots available for this offer, so contact me quickly via the contact page if you want to make sure you get a discounted design.

To find out how to get your garden designed remotely, please visit the postal garden design service page. This will give you all the information you need.

DIY Design Special Offer and Prize Draw!

For those wishing to design their own garden, check out last week’s special offer and prize draw to win the Great Garden Formula Design Course. If you purchase either the deck or patio design book from Amazon (at the currently reduced price of £2.99) and leave a review, you will automatically be upgraded to the full mini-course which includes video tutorials (which normally retails for £24.95) for free!

Everyone who leaves a review will automatically be entered into a prize draw to win the Great Garden Formula worth £197 ($297)! To find out more, please visit the special offer and prize draw page.

Special Offer on Deck and Patio Design mini-courses & a chance to win the Great Garden Formula Design Course worth $297.

Here’s how to enter the garden design course competition to win Great Garden Formula Design Course worth $297 (and 20 deck & patio mini-course upgrades):

1) Purchase either the Patio Design Course from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk or Deck Design Course from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk (if you are an Amazon Prime member you can get the book for free!).

2) Leave an honest review on either Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com

3) Email Rachel via the contact form with the name you left the review under and which Amazon site you left it on BEFORE 15th June.

Prize Draw Terms & Conditions:

Only one entry per person. You must have read the book and provide a genuine review that will help Amazon customers decide if the book is right for them. If there were things in the book you thought could be improved upon, say so in your review. Any ‘fake’ reviews that are deemed not to have met the above conditions will be disregarded at the discretion of Successful Design Ltd.

All entries must be received before 15th June 2012 to qualify. The first 20 people to provide proof of their reviews via email will be upgraded to the full mini-course which includes the colour pdf ebook and the video tutorials (10 for the patio course & 10 for the deck course).

All valid entries will be entered into the main prize draw for the Great Garden Formula Online Garden Design Course to be held on 15th June. The prize cannot be substituted for a cash amount. There will be 3 winners, chosen at random via Twitter and Facebook interactions.

The winners will be notified via email and results will be published on Facebook and Twitter. By entering into the competition you agree to these terms.

Last week we looked at how to plan the perfect deck. This week it’s the turn of planning the perfect patio. Just like with a designing a deck, a little bit of planning goes a long way when it comes to creating a great looking patio. Putting your ideas down on paper will save you a lot of time and, potentially, money, and will ensure you get your dream patio.

Planning on paper first allows you to see if your ideas will work. It’s also much easier to change your mind and make adjustments on paper than it is during construction.

If the thought of plotting your patio onto paper seems like a daunting task, don’t worry; it’s actually much easier than you think.

It will give you the opportunity to make sure your patio works with the rest of your garden. You don’t want to build your masterpiece only to have it looking like it fell out the sky and landed in your garden!

Critical Patio Design Details to Get Right

It’s important to get the right shape, size and materials. The patio needs to be in proportion not only to your house but the rest of the garden. Too big or too small will always look wrong, no matter how hard you try to disguise it after it’s built.

Getting the right shape for your patio is one of the most critical parts of successful garden design. Shapes can create interest. They can make an area look and feel larger or smaller. It’s vital you choose a shape that enhances your home and garden and helps you get the most from your outside space. But avoid shapes that are too complicated.

Patio Design Software

To begin with, it’s better to grab a sheet of paper to try out your ideas. Resist the lure of the complex online design software. Useful as these free tools can be for working out the quantity of materials you will need, their prime purpose is often to help sell more paving. So keep that in mind, as the software’s suggestions may not be the best design for your property.

Patio design software can often come up with unnecessarily complicated schemes. Complex designs can look good on the computer screen but in reality they don’t usually make the best use of the available space and will often make areas feel awkward. This is especially true if there are lots of unnecessary level changes and angles in the design. Good design is usually very simple in concept.

How to Incorporate Changes in Level in Your Patio

Changes of level need to be handled with particular care, as these will have an enormous impact on how you use your garden. A level change will create exciting opportunities to make a stunning use of the space.

Done correctly, a change in height from one part of your patio to the surrounding areas of garden will enable you to add interesting features like built-in seating, planting beds, lighting effects and water features.

The main thing to make sure you do with a level change is incorporate it in a way that flows naturally so that it is instinctive and easy to get from one area to another. You don’t want your friends and family tripping up on an unexpected level change.

Building on a Budget

It can cost virtually the same amount of money to build a well-designed patio that enhances your home, linking it beautifully with the rest of the garden to one that’s boring and badly designed. So plan carefully before you build.

Once you’ve planned the size and shape of patio you want, you will need to consider the cost of the building materials. There are many options available to you, from natural stone,concrete and reclaimed stone paving. Research what’s available in your local area that works with your tastes, budget and design.

Need Help Designing Your Patio Properly?

If you’d like to be guided through the entire design process, in-depth and step-by-step, I’ve created a mini-course on how to design a patio which contains a detailed colour ebook and three accompanying video tutorials that will show you how to create the perfect patio for your garden.

How to Design a Patio will show you how to:

• Avoid the most common patio design mistakes
• Choose the best location for your patio
• Plot your patio and garden onto paper
• How to properly plan your patio
• Make the patioing area look and feel longer or wider

You don’t need to be a great artist to design a great looking garden. The design tricks and techniques you’ll learn in this book are simple yet highly effective.

Also included in the book and accompanying videos, how to:

• Design a patio that works with the whole garden
• Effectively tackle changes in level
• Design a beautiful garden on a budget
• Make the most of the available space using cunning design tricks
• Successfully incorporate built in planters, seating and lighting
• Choose the right building materials from sustainable sources
• Double check you’ve got everything right before your patio is built
• Choose the right professional to construct it

The ebook and videos are instant access. It is completely online and can be viewed onscreen or downloaded to portable devices. There’s a 30-day full money back guarantee if it’s not right for you for any reason, so you can buy it with complete confidence.

A little bit of planning goes a long way when it comes to creating a great looking deck. Putting your ideas down on paper will save you a lot of time and, potentially, money, and will ensure you get your dream deck.

Planning on paper first allows you to see if your ideas will work. It’s also much easier to change your mind and make adjustments on paper than it is during construction.

If the thought of plotting your deck onto paper seems like a daunting task, don’t worry; it’s actually much easier than you think.

It will give you the opportunity to make sure your deck works with the rest of your garden. You don’t want to build your masterpiece only to have it looking like it fell out the sky and landed in your garden!

Critical Deck Design Details to Get Right

It’s important to get the right shape, size and materials. The decking needs to be in proportion not only to your house but the rest of the garden. Too big or too small will always look wrong, no matter how hard you try to disguise it after it’s built.

Getting the right shape for your deck is one of the most critical parts of successful garden design. Shapes can create interest. They can make an area look and feel larger or smaller. It’s vital you choose a shape that enhances your home and garden and helps you get the most from your outside space. But avoid shapes that are too complicated.

Deck Design Software

To begin with, it’s better to grab a sheet of paper to try out your ideas. Resist the lure of the complex online design software. Useful as these free tools can be for working out the quantity of materials you will need, their prime purpose is often to help sell more decking and ancillary products like railings. So keep that in mind, as the software’s suggestions may not be the best design for your property.

Deck design software can often come up with unnecessarily complicated schemes. Complex designs can look good on the computer screen but in reality they don’t usually make the best use of the available space and will often make areas feel awkward. This is especially true if there are lots of unnecessary level changes and angles in the design. Good design is usually very simple in concept.

How to Incorporate Changes in Level in Your Deck

Changes of level need to be handled with particular care, as these will have an enormous impact on how you use your garden. A level change will create exciting opportunities to make a stunning use of the space.

Done correctly, a change in height from one part of your deck to the surrounding areas of garden will enable you to add interesting features like built-in seating, planting beds, lighting effects and water features.

The main thing to make sure you do with a level change is incorporate it in a way that flows naturally so that it is instinctive and easy to get from one area to another. You don’t want your friends and family tripping up on an unexpected level change.

Building on a Budget

It can cost virtually the same amount of money to build a well-designed deck that enhances your home, linking it beautifully with the rest of the garden to one that’s boring and badly designed. So plan carefully before you build.

Once you’ve planned the size and shape of deck you want, you will need to consider the cost of the building materials. There are many options available to you, from sustainable hardwoods to treated softwoods, reclaimed timbers and composite recycled materials. Research what’s available in your local area that works with your tastes, budget and design.

Need Help Designing Your Deck Properly?

If you’d like to be guided through the entire design process, in-depth and step-by-step, I’ve created a mini-course on how to design a deck which contains a detailed colour ebook and three accompanying video tutorials that will show you how to create the perfect deck for your garden.

How to Design a Deck will show you how to:

• Avoid the most common deck design mistakes
• Choose the best location for your deck
• Plot your deck and garden onto paper
• How to properly plan your deck
• Make the decking area look and feel longer or wider

You don’t need to be a great artist to design a great looking garden. The design tricks and techniques you’ll learn in this book are simple yet highly effective.

Also included in the book and accompanying videos, how to:

• Design a deck that works with the whole garden
• Effectively tackle changes in level
• Design a beautiful garden on a budget
• Make the most of the available space using cunning design tricks
• Successfully incorporate built in planters, seating and lighting
• Choose the right building materials from sustainable sources
• Double check you’ve got everything right before your deck is built
• Choose the right professional to construct it

The ebook and videos are instant access. It is completely online and can be viewed onscreen or downloaded to portable devices. There’s a 30-day full money back guarantee if it’s not right for you for any reason, so you can buy it with complete confidence.

Get instant access to the full online mini-course now for only £24.95.

For those of you who have been following Successful Garden Design for a while, you may remember the small courtyard garden design we did in Spain. It’s been just over 18 months since the planting was finished, so in January I popped over there to film progress. See the video below!

I’m often asked by clients if they would be better off with a fence or a hedge to surround their garden. There are pros and cons to each. Here are some of the main things to consider:

Combinations

If you are keen to have a hedge but need to screen or secure your property, one approach is to put up a temporary wire fence and grow the hedge along one side of it. Eventually the hedge will grow through the wire.  (Just be a little careful when you are trimming it.)

You can grow almost any shrub and train it into a hedge.  Some obviously work better than others, but it’s definitely something you can have fun with. Before you get too carried away with an over the top hedge choice, here’s one thing to bear in mind…

Traditional Works Well For Good Reason…

What are you going to put next to the hedge? For example, using a variegated shrub with bright pink flowers may seem like a good idea.  But if your plant border is also full of red and orange flowers, it may not look so good when everything is flowering together!

This is why I like to be pretty boring with my hedge choices.  I tend to go for plain green because it’s a good colour backdrop for everything else I want to do in the garden.

The same goes for fence colours. Yes, I know you can get vivid cerise fence paint but that doesn’t always make it a good choice with everything else you have in your garden!

Favorite Fence Styles:

Featheredge Fence

I prefer hand-built fences made in situ in the garden rather than pre-made panels.  Hand-built fences tend to be stronger, and you can make them fit the size of the area.  Pre-made panels rarely fit exactly how you’d like, which means you typically need to cut them to fit the space. This type of hand-built featheredge fencing (see photo at left) is very popular here in the UK.

If your existing fence is still strong but looks ugly, or it happens to be the neighbour’s fence, my favourite trick is to cover it with willow screening.

Willow screening attached to old fence

For a modern look, I love using simple tile batten (approx. 1″ x 2” wide pressure treated timber). It’s not ideal for total privacy but it does work for simple screening.

Tile batten slat fence

Favourite Hedges:

Laurel hedge

Laurel is the king of hedges. It’s got beautiful large evergreen, glossy leaves. It can take shade, sun, dry and wettish conditions (but not waterlogged soil).

Yew hedge arch with low box hedge

Yew is another favourite of mine, but it can be rather slow to establish and doesn’t cope well with wet soils.

Native hedge

Native hedge mix is probably the one I use the most because it blends well with English countryside locations and is great for wildlife. It is also fairly inexpensive when bareroot plants are purchased. The only drawback is that it’s not evergreen.

Good Suppliers:

It’s worth hunting around for a good fencing stockist rather than just what’s in the local DIY store because quality and prices can vary dramatically.

A good nursery or garden centre can help you with hedges.  If you put your order in ahead of time for a good quantity, you likely be able to negotiate a discount.

One place I can certainly recommend for laurel hedging is C & S Mathews Ltd. Yes they are related, so that’s how I know just how good the laurels are! They specialise in supplying large laurels for near instant hedges.  They feature a variety of laurel that grows quickly, stays green all year, and doesn’t turn the usual yellowy colour in the winter months.

Other News – Success Story

I recently received an email from Karen Sprinkle that totally made my day. She watched a free video tutorial on how to design your garden and she was then able to go off and solve the garden problem that had been totally bugging her for years! She’s written about it on her clear the clutter and mind blog, go take a look!

And just click on the link if you’d like to view the garden design video tutorial that helped her so much.

What Are Your Favourites?

Which fence or hedging plants have impressed you most and why? Please leave your comments below.

Two things to tell you about this week. The first is totally unrelated to gardening!

I’m very excited to tell you about a new business I’ve set up with my business partner Eugen (tech super genius) which specialises in affordable websites, ecommerce and graphic design for small businesses. We also design and set up Facebook fan pages and Twitter backgrounds etc.

 So if you know anyone that needs a website makeover, tech support or graphic design, please tell them about us and send them to My Online Business Team.

We also offer ongoing support & training on how to use your website so you don’t need to pay someone every time you need to make a change to your site.

The second thing is about the fab new free online plant database called Right Plant 4 Me that I did a video tutorial on how to use it to find the right plants for your garden…

Well the creator of it, Neil Bromhall has got in touch to see if there are any recommendations on how he can improve it. So if you have any suggestions, please put them in the comments below and I will pass them onto him.

In case you missed it last time, here’s a quick video tutorial on how to use this great free online software.

Click Here to Watch the Video

Until next time, enjoy your garden!

Rachel

If you’d like to learn how to know what conditions you have as well as what plants suit them, quickly and easily, then also take a look at the 5 Minute Plant Expert.

Summer is the one time of year that we get a chance to really enjoy our garden, but if your backyard isn’t looking as good as it could, it can certainly lessen the enjoyment!

If you think you’ve left it too late to improve your landscape now, don’t worry, you haven’t. I’m going to shares five simple tips that will help you transform your garden so you can increase your enjoyment this summer. There is nothing worse than finally sitting down in your favourite sun lounger only to start noticing how various parts of the garden aren’t looking good.

Top 5 Tips to Transform Your Garden

1. First off, photograph your garden as it is now. Photographs can help you see the overall picture, which you can sometimes miss when you are in the garden. Also you’ll know which parts work and which don’t during the summer months, this can help you when planning for next year.
2. Cut back any untidy plants that have finished flowering (unless you live somewhere hot and dry, wait until it’s cooler). Just a little bit of a tidy up will do wonders with how your garden looks.
3. Edge your lawn, preferably in a coherent shape that will improve the look and flow of your garden.
4. Fill in any gaps with seasonal perennials or annuals in tubs. A big burst of flowers will create dramatic interest and liven up any dull spots.
5. Strategically placed focal points like benches, pots, urns and statues in key viewing locations. This draws the eye around the garden and creates visual full stops, which helps bring coherency to unruly planting schemes.

These five simple things alone will make a world of difference to how your garden looks. Then it’s just a matter of inviting your friends and family around, and enjoying your wonderful landscape. Throw a burger or two on for me please!

Video Tutorial

If you’d like to see some of the principles mentioned above in action, just watch this great garden design video tutorial.

And if you have any tips you would like to share or questions you would like answered on your garden, please ask them in the comments below.

I’m thrilled to be able to tell you about this new and FREE online plant database. It makes choosing the right plants for your garden sooooo much easier.

If you want to be able to choose plants for your garden by flower colour, height, sun or shady positions then check out Neil Bromhall’s new online database website called Right Plant 4 Me.

Here’s a quick video tutorial on how to use this great free online software

If you’d like to learn how to know what conditions you have as well as what plants suit them, quickly and easily, then also take a look at the 5 Minute Plant Expert.

It is often said that the Chelsea Flower Show is the world’s best garden show (for those outside the UK think of it as a horticultural Wimbledon). I view the Chelsea flower show as a catwalk for garden design. All the latest fashions and trends in one place.

Like with fashion, a lot of what you see at Chelsea is designer flights of fancy. But having said that, if you look beneath the hypey ‘just for show’ stuff, beyond that is real design inspiration that can be used in any garden.

One complaint often raised is that the gardens are impractical and are beyond the reach of most people. The show gardens at Chelsea cost around £180,000 to build.

So How Do You Translate Chelsea Catwalk Fashion Into Your Garden At An Affordable Price?

British Heart Foundation Garden

Rather than focusing on the unaffordable elements of the show gardens, focus on how you can translate something that inspires you into something that works in your own garden.

Ideas themselves are often not expensive, its construction and materials used at Chelsea that cost the money. For example Ann-Marie Powell’s garden for the British Heart Foundation has lush green planting round a central pool. The elements that make it standout are the bright red metal tubing that has been used to form archways. If you wanted to copy that, the tubing doesn’t have to be metal, nor does it have to be red. You could create the look using plastic pipe on top of metal rods inserted into the ground.

Coloured plastic pipe

You probably need a bit more space between each set of pipe because they’d clatter in the wind, but you get the point you can create something like this for a fraction of the cost with a bit of imagination. And one advantage with using plastic piping instead of expensive metal tubing would be if you get fed up with it you can quickly and easily remove it and if you’re really nifty you could recycle the piping and make a poly tunnel frame!

Construction Counts

Monaco floating deck planter

Another example is the fabulous central feature of a floating deck lavender planter in the Monaco garden. Now whilst it looks wonderful without upright supports to make it look like it’s floating, the expense of RSJ and the construction efforts that would go into creating it aren’t really worth it for most gardens. You could create something very similar for a fraction of the cost if used a pergola frame clad in hardwood decking.

The runway of deck in that Monaco garden doesn’t have to be a water chute for a pool, it could just be a deck path.

How To Use Inspiration In Your Garden

When you see something you like train yourself to ask what is it specifically that you like about it. Is it the colour, shape, texture or planting? Once you’ve narrowed it down you can then work out cost-effective way of doing the something similar in your own garden.

If you’d like to learn more about successfully planning your own garden take a look at my online garden design course the homeowners. Here I’ll guide you step-by-step through everything you need to know to create fantastic garden.

To see more of the show gardens visit the RHS website. What inspiration have you taken from this year’s Chelsea Flower show?