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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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?

Garden Centres will not want me to tell you this…

In fact some may be REALLY upset. But tough, this is something you need to know. Especially as now is the time hundreds and thousands of you will be queuing up and spending a small fortune on plants.

We all know that any retail outlet has stacks of goodies to sell us which are all carefully positioned in key locations. Garden centres are no different. And like most good retailers they know exactly what sells well and tempts us the most. Nothing wrong in that what so ever. But, a lot of what is on these tempting displays simply isn’t suitable to grow in your garden.

That’s not so good because it effectively means if you buy the wrong things, you’ve wasted your money.

Not good at all.

So how do you avoid being sucked in when you see a beautiful display of irresistible plants?

If you want to buy something that will look good each and every year and be of great value, then you need to be really clued up, so those impulse buys end up being a good investment and not a waste of your money.

Garden centres these days do have a lot more growing information and helpful tips than ever before, but if you don’t know what conditions you have in your garden then they are next to useless.

There are some pretty simple things that anyone can do to work out what your garden needs BEFORE you go plant buying.

5 TOP Tips for Successful Plant Buying

1. BEFORE you head off to the garden centre, make a note of which parts of your garden get the sun and shade.
2. What type of soil do you have? If you don’t know, dig a few test holes in your garden to look at the soil – see if it is waterlogged, dry, compacted, stoney etc.
3. Take a photo of your garden with you to the garden centre so you can see where you might put any new purchases (and check if they go with what’s there now).
4. When you find yourself about to impulse buy something on display, work out where in the garden you would put the new plant and also check to see if the location you have in mind has enough sun/shade, wet/dry to suit the new plant from the notes you made.
5. Check how big the new purchase is likely to get – do you have room for it? And finally how long does it look good for? All year long or is it a 5 minute wonder ?

Do you still want it after answering all these questions? If so, yes, go for it, good purchase decision!

By taking a few minutes beforehand to check out your garden and just make sure that everything you’ve been tempted with will grow and work with your existing garden, should save you from buying hugely inappropriate plants which you’ll only regret later!

Here’s The Big Secret That Most Plant Books Don’t Tell You…

If you know what to look for, a lot of plants themselves will tell you exactly what type of conditions they like to grow in, without you even needing to look at the label! You don’t need to study masses of books or take a long horticultural course.

For example any plant with a grey/ silver colour to the leaf cannot take shade. None. They are designed to reflect the sunlight. So it’s the plant equivalent of wearing sunglass, a blessing in the sun, but lethal in the shade!

There are many other clues you can look for, too many to go into on this post but just by looking at plants that area growing well in your area, you can learn a great deal.

There Really is No Need to Learn Hundreds and Hundreds of Different Plants

Just learn the characteristics that the sun & shade lovers have in common, so you can spot them when you’re in the garden centre. You’ll soon know what will grow where, just by looking at the leaves.

If you’d like to know more on how you can quickly and easily know all the ‘Plant Whisperer’ Secrets, take a look at the 5 Minute Plant Expert. It will tell you everything you need to know about choosing the right plants for your garden…

And if you’d like to see a short video that explains how easy it is to become a plant expert, visit http://www.courses.successfulgardendesign.com/plant-expert-4/

To listen to the interview, check out the Great Garden Formula Podcast, episode 2 on iTunes.

David Stevens is an internationally acclaimed garden designer and author. David has written 22 books including favourites like Backyard Blueprints and has won 11 Gold Medals at the Chelsea Flower Show in London.

Rachel: Hi David, thank you so much for joining me. One thing I’ve always wanted to ask you is how did you first get into garden design?

David: Oh it’s a long story really, garden design, horticulture, gardening is one of those things where you try everything else before you find what you really want to do, I’ve always been able to draw, and I’ve always enjoyed drawing. I was always fixated on maps and drawing and that kind of thing. But then at school we never really got to know about horticulture or anything like that to be honest. When I left school and tried all sorts of jobs like the police force and the army and couldn’t get on with those at all, that’s when I suddenly found garden design. I studied landscape architecture and did a five-year degree course, worked with John Brooks back in the 70s. It was a while ago and was good fun, it still is.

Rachel: Yes that’s one thing I really notice about you. You keep your passion and design interest after all these years, do you continually rework your design style, what keeps your interest?

David: I think you’ve got to, if you lose interest in any subject pack it in! I think it’s a kind of shame in the way I’ve got a lot of pals in the industry and you can see that some of them have reached their peak and carry on designing the same stuff and it looks good and it’s very competent but you can see they’ve not really pushed themselves and I couldn’t do that. It would feel wrong, you know what I mean?

Rachel: Oh definitely, I know exactly what you mean.

David: You’ve got to keep improving, hopefully!

Rachel: Every time I feel myself getting a little bit bored, I realise it’s time to stretch myself and develop my designing more. And thankfully seem to get client that is a bit more adventurous to let the experiment!

David: Absolutely.

Rachel: Can we talk about your process a little bit? Do you have a set process where you see it in your mind or do you need to work on paper?

David: The mind part has got better over the years, there’s no doubt about that. When I’m talking to other designers or teaching, it’s all to do with getting information and getting inside your client’s head, that’s where it all starts. It’s not my garden it is their garden, garden designers are just facilitators. You put your own ideas in your own skills in to make it work but at the end of the day it has to be just for them.

Yes it is on paper, we were on computer graphics years ago, but I never really got on with it. It’s probably because I was trained as a draughtsman and a landscape architect. It’s the relationship between my hand pen that really gets it. I think it was Frank Lloyd Wright said if you don’t have something pretty much in your mind, there is no point in fiddling around on paper. I tend, as time goes by, to see a client and I’ve got it pretty much before I leave the client, then you can get it on paper and take it from there.

Rachel: Ah that’s good, I was someone who could never visualize, so it’s only been in the last few years that I’ve been able to visualize how a garden would look. So I try to reassure people that are new to garden design, as long as you start off with paper and create a way to visualize it, it doesn’t matter and you don’t have to be a massive artistic talent.

David: Well no it doesn’t, I think just to start with you do need to work on paper and it just comes down to experience, which is the one thing you can’t teach! You can teach guidelines and rules but with experience you’ve just got to do it, I suppose and it comes with time.

Rachel: And practice definitely!

If you could give some advice to people just want to do their own garden what would be your top tips on where to start with a garden, and what are the biggest mistakes people should avoid?

David: The first biggest mistake is on the first warm day of spring to bowl off down the garden centre and go on a random binge of purchases! Unfortunately something we all still do, we all still get seduced by plants, but the key thing with your own garden is to take your time. I would say to people if you can take a year and watch the turning of the seasons, to see how high the Sun pictures in the summer and see where the shadow patterns are, check what sort of soil you’ve got and where the good and bad views are, and unconsciously after a while the design will start to make itself obvious to you.

Whether you call it a design or whether it’s your place in the garden you’ll know whether to put a stream in or whether you need a seat in, or if that corner catches the afternoon sun, wouldn’t it be great for an arbour? Slowly your ideas will start to come together to the main thing is honestly not to rush and do it straight away. So analyse, make lists, open it up to the whole family, do what ever you can so you don’t rush in and waste your money. Otherwise the garden centres and nurseries will just be rubbing their hands together every time they see you!

And information gathering is fun, and it’s amazing how much your ideas will change, and by all means look through magazines and tear out ideas and perhaps make a mood board, just get together the things you like and are attracted to. Whether it’s kinds of plants or plant combinations or a brick path, whether it’s hard landscaping of one kind or another, whether it’s water, all of those things will hone in on the kind of style you like. Very often the style is picked up from the house, you live in a house that you like the architecture, and the architecture then gets translated into the garden, you extend the lines out, you extend the materials.

The garden isn’t in isolation, you can’t separate it from the house, the landscape, the cityscape, which is very important.

Rachel: And for those people that have just newly qualified, they have just come out of college and are a little bit nervous, what advice would you give them?

David: Don’t worry! We’ve all had that thing called designer’s block, you’ve had it I’ve had it, I still get it. You sit there and look at the drawing board and all the measurements, you’ve talked to the client, all the rest of it and you’re still stuck. So get up from the drawing board, take the dog for a walk, have a cup of coffee, and it will start fall into place.

I think honestly that a lot of it has to do with confidence, and some people are simply more confident than others. I wasn’t particularly confident in the early days, I thought I could probably do it, and with each design you do, that will give you confidence. To start with it will take you longer than you think, sometimes a design will drop straight out in five minutes. You can design something in five minutes but it may take you three days to actually draw it up.

It is honestly down to confidence and that mysterious thing called experience, the more you do the better you get. One thing that designers and artists often have is the ability to feel when you’ve done it right, you’ve got to feel good about it. So if you are feeling happy, then it’s right. If you’re not very happy about it you can keep going until you get it right.

Another important thing is you’ve got to learn to think three-dimensionally, unless you’re working on CAD you need able to do in your head, think how high the trees are and how tall hedge is, how dense your shrub border is. Always thinking three-dimensionally even though you’ve got to put it onto paper.

My honest advice is to stick with it, look, read, get inspiration from whatever source you can. A lot of my inspiration is architectural. It can come from other designers, cruise the web, your website is great!

Rachel: Thank you!

David: Well it is! I found it and thought this looks good. The more you look on the web, the more books, and I’m a bookaholic, most gardeners tend to become a bookaholic, the more you’ll learn. Visit gardens, take lots of pictures and a notebook; otherwise we forget so easily. Simple plant combinations can look quite fantastic but always record it so you have a record of it so you don’t forget. So information, information, information, gather, gather, gather, that’s where you broaden your palate, it really is.

Rachel: Yes, I used to have a designer swipe file and it was your books I used to use for inspiration!

David: That’s very kind! You do get information from books whoever’s they are. They’ll give you inspiration and get your mind working perhaps in a different direction and that’s the important thing.

Rachel: Yes just flicking through them before you start to design, I used to find that things would just mesh together and I would know where I got the information from. And you could never really copy a design because no two gardens are the same.

David: You just need to develop your own style and that’s what clients or customers want. I was influenced by Sylvia Crowe and the Bauhaus movement and all design really springs from there. We all design, in many ways, in all the same way. It’s all to do with practical thinking in keeping it simple.

That’s another thing, if you designing your own garden for goodness sake, keep it simple! Over complication is the death of a good design in whatever form.

Rachel: Is there a way people can stop themselves from making things overly complicated?

David: Mmm it’s a bit like when you do a watercolor you should know when to stop and you can easily overwork it. I almost feel that it, so it’s quite an intangible thing in a way. A lot of designers work off checklists so you tend to prioritize that checklist and you can eliminate the things of the least importance and then if you want to add extra things it works and doesn’t feel too busy. Design is a structured process which you build up and I build my design up in areas, I work away from the house. Work out at the beginning if you really need all these things and that will help you during the design. Can things be combined so you can save space in a small garden?

Part 2 of the interview will be up next week. To find out more about David Stevens, visit his garden design website.

If you can’t wait until then, check out the Great Garden Formula Home Study Course – step by step guidance on how to make your garden look fabulous.

Have you ever tried to improve your garden, excitedly trundling off to the nearest garden centre, come back with a car load of plants, having spent a small fortune, only to find you’re really not happy with the results?

So, why is this? Garden centres are absolutely full of beautiful plants, so theoretically, all you’ve got to do is bring them home and put them in and hey presto, you have a fantastic looking garden.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t really work like that because of one thing….

What Is The Mysterious Ingredient To A Great Looking Garden?

It’s that little old thing called shape. Now by shape, I don’t mean the size and shape of your garden boundary. That shape isn’t important.

What’s important are the shapes you create in the areas of ‘empty space’ like your lawn and patio areas. If you get these right, they define how the rest of the garden looks – and that is critical. Plants really are just the icing on the cake; they’re not the cake itself.

Have you ever had a cake baking disaster where you got the sponges out of the oven with one side so flat it looked like someone had sat on it? I have! And no matter how much tinkering to make it look good, it just doesn’t work.

My cake baking efforts were so bad I couldn’t just sprinkle icing sugar on top, I had to try and ice it and pretend it wasn’t supposed to be a Victoria Sponge. Can you picture how awful that looked?

Clearly a good job I didn’t want to bake cakes for a living!

It doesn’t make a difference whether it’s cakes or gardens. You have to get shape right first, otherwise, it’s disastrous.

Plants alone cannot give you a fantastic looking garden no matter how nice they are. You have to get the shape right first, otherwise, you’ll be about as successful as I was trying to disguise my malformed sponge creations.

Does Your Garden Pass The Test?

If like most people, you’ve placed things wherever you had space, chances are you haven’t got the results you really wanted with your garden. This is because the garden isn’t flowing from one area to another very well – and that is one of the main keys of good design.

A good garden should be a whole entity even if you divide it up into various rooms like you do with a house – it still has to function as one whole unit.

The fact is, when you have an overall lawn shape that links everything, it automatically just works without you having to do a great deal. Just one coherent shape can make an enormous difference to your garden.

Does Your Garden Have A Coherent Shape (lawn and patio areas)?

If your garden doesn’t have a coherent shape, the good news is, it doesn’t cost a fortune to alter the shape of your lawn. Just doing this one thing will make a tremendous difference to your garden.

If you’re feeling creative and have the space, linking several key shapes together really does look amazing very easily. Now this method works regardless of whether you have an established garden or a complete blank canvass.

So if your garden is established, is there a shape you can make with the lawn area and perhaps the patio as well that links all the items in your garden together?

A Trick To Visualisation

To help you visualise, get a piece of paper and literally scribble down the outline of your garden as it is now. And then try and put in place a very large geometric shape that just links everything.

There is a little trick that you can use to help you visualise; once you’ve drawn the shape, leave the paper flat on the table and then just duck down so that the table and paper is at eye level and you’ll find that you kind of get a little bit of perspective look to it and that will give you the idea of how it will look.

Secrets Explained Further…

If you’d like to learn more about how to make your garden look great, then you’ll find this garden design video tutorial very helpful!

I’m going to start this week’s blog post by shamelessly stealing someone else’s idea! My good friend Jenny Peterson did a great garden video showing highlights of her gardening year in 2010.  So, I thought I’d do a video of all the fantastic gardens I visited last year. Here it is…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Alhambra Palace garden Granada Spain

Hannah Peschar Sculpture Garden

Burghley House Lincolnshire

Alcázar de los Reyes Cristianos, Cordoba, Spain

Coimbra Botanic Garden, Portugal

Parque de Maria Luisa, Sevilla, Spain

Jardines de las Reales Alcazares

Exciting News!

I’m interviewing internationally acclaimed, award-winning garden designer and author David Stevens tomorrow for the new podcast series. Do you have any questions on garden design that you’d like me to ask him? If so, please leave them in the comments below or send me an email from the contact page of this website.

More News!

I know, bumper packed news this week – the 5 Minute Plant Expert is now finished. In this mini-course you’ll learn all the tricks and shortcuts to becoming a ‘Plant Whisperer’ just by working through the simple mini-course for 5 minutes a day for 2 weeks!

Creating a garden with the ‘Wow!’ Factor is easier than you think, if you follow 3 simple rules.

The reason few people have a really fantastic garden is because the route to creating them is somewhat counterintuitive…

1. Keep It Simple!

Simple? But I want Wow! Factor, I hear you cry. How can Simple = Wow? Let’s have an example. Think about the most beautiful car you’ve ever seen, picture it in detail.

Now try and imagine that same car with a pyramid shaped bonnet, a flat roof and a ski slope shaped rear! How is it looking? Not quite so sleek, huh? Forgetting for a moment it’s completely impractical, you probably wouldn’t want to be seen driving around your neighbourhood in it.

In a nutshell, simple coherent shapes work the best. It doesn’t matter if it’s a car or the shape of your lawn, simple shapes make good design, which always tops overcomplicated.

2.  Use The Rule Of Three When Choosing  Materials

It can be easy to overcomplicate the choice of materials in the garden. As in our first example, too much creates a chaotic effect. If you stick to the simple rule of three, you won’t go wrong.

The three rule doesn’t apply to plants, but hard landscaping materials like paving, gravel and walls.

Just make sure that you don’t use any more than three different types of hard landscaping material. So, for example, if you have a patio, you can mix one type of paving with some gravel and incorporates bricks and it will look good. Start to add in tiles, cobbles and a wall using a different type of brick and you’ll have a hotchpotch which will look ugly.

Think of it like adding clothes to your body. Do you want to wear 10 different textured fabrics that don’t match, or have a coherent outfit using three or less fabrics?

3. Plants Are The Finishing Touch Not The Starting Point

Blasphemy, I know! This is often the hardest part for people to take on board. We all love plants. They are what makes the garden a garden, surely? Well, yes and no.

Creating a fantastic looking garden is a bit like baking a cake. The ingredients have to go in the right amount and most importantly, in the right order. Plants are the icing on the cake, they are not cake itself.

When you’ve created a beautiful but simple shape lawn and patio area, then it is time to add the plants (the decoration). Think about how effective it would be, if you added the icing sugar and cherries before the cake had baked. Can you imagine what a mess that would be?

Unfortunately, the same thing happens if you start out by trying to put the plants in before you have shaped the main areas of your garden.  Your lawn is likely to end up a random shape that doesn’t create interest or make the garden look and feel more spacious.

The Secret Sauce

Any form of art or design always looks harder than it actually is when you haven’t been taught the basics. Creating a Wow Factor garden is easy to do when you know what steps to take.

If you’d like to be guided step-by-step through the process, take a look at The Great Garden Formula HomeStudy Course – it covers everything you need to know in an easy to understand format with video tutorials along side the written materials. And as it’s coming up to Christmas, for a limited time, you can get it for half price! Take a look now, and give your garden the Wow Factor it deserves!