Garden Design

I am tempted to say - don't...

That's unfair. Every garden has a structure, and so a design. However, some TV programmes have experts descend on a garden, rip everything out and start again, doing everything in a matter of days (or less) and behold - there's a garden! Even if you don't get in other people to do is, you may be tempted to do the same thing yourself. This is not my approach. If you get an expert to design your garden, then it's not your garden, it's the expert's, and it might make you hesitant to change anything. If you do it yourself all at once, you need to know a lot about gardening to get it right. Also, if you rip everything out, then you might remove attractive plants that take years to mature. You can replace them, of course, but then you'll need to wait years before those new plants are mature.

I think that the best way to "design" a garden is to look at what's there already. It might be worth waiting a year to see what perennials are there. Find out the sunny parts of the garden, and the shady parts where plants struggle to grow. See how much you're overlooked by your neighbours, and whether you mind this (I don't!)

Then decide what you seriously don't like. Get rid of it! It's your garden, after all. And think about what you would like instead. Read the Garden style page for ideas, perhaps. Look at other people's gardens. Think about how you want to use the garden (look at flowers, sit in it, have children or pets play there, grow fruit or vegetables). I suggest that you don't try to do everything at once! Think of it as a collection of projects: "This year, we're going to do this..." That way, you see what works and what doesn't, and develop and change your ideas as you go along.

The most basic limitation is the size and shape of your garden. You may see a beautiful large garden somewhere and fall in love with it. But it may just not fit in your garden! (On the other hand, there may be a corner somewhere where you can have some flowers from that garden, or something else which caught your eye.) The shape of your garden affects the design as well. I have a very long, thin garden (30 metres by 4 metres). What can I do that doesn't look silly? (My solution, partly inspired by what the previous owner had done was to break the garden into bits which are more sensible shapes - the rose bed, the (tiny) lawn, the herb garden, the soft fruit garden, the vegetable patch, and so on. But you may find solutions of your own.)

Your garden may have a boundary of some sort - a fence or wall or hedge. Or there just may be an invisible line between your garden and your neighbours. You may want to change this. It will change the look of the garden, of course. I must admit that I've not bothered by this - accepting what was there already, or what my neighbours do.

There is "hard landscaping". These include paths (other than grass ones), paving, decking, and also sheds and greenhouses. Again, I've done little of this. We've kept the original paths. We replaced a shed (the old one fell down!) I've never bothered with a greenhouse. I have bought a wooden seat, with some paving stones underneath it. On the whole, I've been wary of hand landscaping. It costs money, it has to be installed, you normally can't move it, so if you make a mistake, you've wasted the money. But you may find that you need a shed, or a path, or a seat. Or you really, really want one! I had this image in my mind of an arch way into the garden. I constructed one from wood which was extremely basic. This gradually got replaced or improved. Now there is one (really solid) piece of wood across, and the rest of the "arch" is the wisteria. It certainly wasn't wat I had originally imagined, or even thought possible. But it works!

Now we start to think about living things. Certain plants are rather permanent. A lawn is in a particular position, and if you want one, you have to decide where, and how big. Lawns can be grown from seed, or turf can be laid. Or get someone else to do it! Remember that you will need to cut the grass... The other big permanent plants are trees and bushes. These can give a good shape to the garden, particularly height. The most important thing to remember is that trees and bushes grow. They grow taller, perhaps really seriously tall. And they grow sideways, taking up more and more room. A neighbour several decades ago stocked their garden with bushes and trees from the garden centre and produced an instant garden. Ever since, subsequent owners of the house have been removing these, a bush or tree at a time. Some are still left, and they are very attractive (and mature!) But the others got out of hand, and weren't worth the space they took up. So be careful, and don't plant too many at once. (Or too close together!) Another thing to consider are the roots of trees and bushes, which make spread out underground a long way. A large tree too close to a house can undermine the house foundations. And trees and bushes tend to suck water and soil nutrient around their trunks, so it may be difficult to grow other plants close to them.

You may want to have part of the garden for flowers and part for vegetables. Vegetables are a crop, and you need a reasonable soil, and sunshine, to get good enough plants to crop well. So you need to know where the sunny bit of the garden is. Vegetable plants don't always look pretty (except to another gardener!) so perhaps keep them further from the house. Some flowers are fussy about where they go, but not all. You should be able to find something pretty to grow even in the bits of the garden that don't get full sunshine all the time. However, there may be dark, dank corners, under trees, where practically nothing will grow! Then there is fruit, which may need its own area, or fit into the flower garden.

These are all big decisions - hard landscaping, large plants, where vegetables or flowers will go. For me, none of that is the fun bit of gardening. The part I like is the differences from one year to the next. I try a new plant - will it grow or not? I find a nice plant that seeds like crazy, and now I have a garden full - is this a good thing or not? I get flowers only in the spring - what can I do about this? What vegetables didn't grow well this year, and why, and can I do anything about it? A lot of this is actually design by Nature rather than me, although I can nudge things along a bit! But as a friend of mine says "My garden decides what it wants to grow, and I just let it!"