The Grand Design

Planning your garden

Planning gardens is rather like planning the living room bringing order, purpose and beauty into what can so easily be muddle and confusion. A well-planned garden has style, character and a sense of purpose and may be surprisingly simple in its design.

Before planning a completely new garden, or re-planning an existing one, study other gardens large and small for ideal use of plants and the way they are planned. There are many gardens open around the country and August is a good month to visit. Remember to take a notebook and pen. You can also bring a camera but do ask permission first.

To get started you will need to draw a simple plan of your garden to suitable scale to include the house and all the boundaries. It must show important features, if any, such as trees, paths or hedges that you want to keep. Now consider carefully the features and kinds of planting you would like to introduce to produce an attractive garden. At this stage you may also find it helpful to visit your local garden centres to see the materials and plants available. Compare their prices and ask advice about gardening in your area.

Now draw up a rough plan of all the important features not present in the existing garden that you wish to include, remembering that gardens with too many features can look overcrowded and can be much more difficult to maintain. Note the following:

• Trees
  Always think carefully before removing trees. They take a long time to replace.
• Lawns
  Reduce the number of small areas of grass
• Screens
  For more privacy replace the open fence with a screen
• Patio
  A place to sit and enjoy the garden

Now you are ready to draw a new plan, showing the alterations you wish to make and fitting in the new features. Try making several different sketch plans before you arrive at the final one that satisfies most of your requirements. Emphasise special features or points of interest. Avoid too many pieces of lawn, or do away with grass altogether. There may be sunny and shady, sheltered and windy, damp and dry places which will also affect your decisions.

If you would like a low-maintenance garden, the secret is to spend lots of time and thought on the planning stages. It is the combination of a realistic layout and a careful choice of features and plants and a use of the proper techniques to look after the garden that will determine its success.

Cost comes into this planning stage, since unless you are a handyman, most of the low-maintenance constructed features like the walls, pavIng, patios, gravel and the like are more expensive to buy than plants, but of course save in the sweat and toil of the upkeep in the long run. These hard materials can be very expensive but should be regarded as a middle or long-term investment. The better the class of materials, if carefully selected and sited, the better will be the design and finish and correspondingly, the lower maintenance afterwards. Always remember the importance of striking a balance between these hard elements and the softer plant ed ones, unless the intention is for a hard, utilitarian approach.

For surfacing and for walls and steps, try to choose materials that match the house. Avoid bright hard colours unless the garden you are planning is really avant-garde! Paths, terraces and patios are usually the most common hard elements of most gardens, linking the different parts. They provide good firm surfaces that really dry out after the rain and that also stand up to the same wear and tear, especially in winter and in wet spells.

Be inventive when choosing and using paving materials. Paving slabs come in many different sizes and colours and the smaller sizes, although often more expensive, will look better in smaller gardens.

Use small slabs or concrete strips as mowing margins to flank borders or walls beside mown grass. When grass meets hard surface a neater maintenance-free finish can be obtained by keeping grass level half an inch above the path.

Loose gravel chippings makes an effective low-maintenance surface for paths, drives and also for dry gardens, but when these meet grass some protective edging is important to stop the gravel encroaching on the grass and damaging mower blades. A metal band is probably the easiest to lay.

A brilliant way to prevent weeds and to help out with the environment is to recycle your old carpet underlays. Simply cut a hole in the underlay big enough for you to place around your newly planted trees and shrubs. Make sure the surrounding soil is weed-free. Then cover the underlay with coloured gravel. The underlay will allow the rain water through to the roots of the plants but will prevent weeds from coming up through the gravel. It will eventually rot down completely.