Now What?

You have the current layout of your garden and you have the answers to your questions from Number 1 in this series. To remind yourself – go back to that article under the Design button on the home page.

I am sure by now, you are creating a vision in your head of what you would like for your garden, whether it be a small redo or a big plan. Choosing the plants is the last thing we do because we still need to figure out a few more things. Regardless of your style, which will gradually emerge, we will dig into that more later, start placing the planting areas, vegetable garden, trees, flower gardens, a pond maybe. You don’t have to do it all at once but put it in the plan, taking into consideration shade and fixed features.   Maybe you will mix vegetables and flowers in one place, where is the sunniest place in the garden for that?

Look out of your windows again and try to visualize what you want to see. Whatever it is, imagine a journey through your garden. If you go out in the morning and walk around your garden, what path do you take and where does it start.  How might that be more interesting? Are you able to see all your garden when you look out the windows?  If some features can be kept hidden, your journey becomes more of a mystery and more interesting. What surprises or focal points could you create? Think of winter interest when you cannot sit in the garden but looking out at sculptural features, plants and trees makes the garden still a place of beauty. Are you a bird watcher? Where will the feeders be? Bringing the outside in makes the garden so much more part of your daily living.

View of my garden from upstairs window in winter.

View from same window in fall.

View from the kitchen window through the clutter. My goal was to block the view of houses that back on to my garden so I only see flowers and green especially in summer.

Thinking of your garden as an extension of your living space, projecting the travelling path out from the easiest access creates a natural flow which is what you are looking for in a house and in a garden.

It is time to start penciling in where you would like to change things, or put features in. How big and what shape should they be. You may wish to go out again into the garden and measure in strides to see what you have drawn on paper matches your drawing. Now is the time to decide if you would rather have a curvy garden or straight lines or break the garden into different areas. A large area of a garden needs to have unification of line, it needs to flow easily so this is an important decision. Get out the pictures you may have printed or collected or the books you drool over.   If you made several copies of your first simple plot plan, you can play and come up with different ideas.

Hard landscaping is a whole topic on its own. Fences, patios, pergolas, greenhouses and more can all be planned for even if they won’t happen for a while.

Once you have a plan of what you would like to create, we can fine tune it with some basic elements of design. You will likely revise it again but this is just part of the process. This is such a fun exercise because you don’t need to be an artist but you do need to be imaginative and creative in your thinking.  We received fresh snow(thank goodness), today, where I live and a fun thing to do is go out and tramp out lines in that fresh snow of where you might be making new beds or areas of interest.

Think of the journey, the features, the mystery, the surprise, a focal point or two, seating.

Have fun! If you get really carried away, you can pick up design drawing tools at Staples. You don’t need them but they are fun to play with! Once we get to planting we will enlarge the scale.