You’ve made a map of your property, showing the location of the house, the driveway, the garage, trees, shrubs, plants, sunshine and shadow, and more.   It was a lot of work.   Now the hard part.  Seriously.  Even harder than the work you face in digging, planting, weeding, and more.   Deciding what you want.   Or, more accurately, DECIDING WHAT YOU WANT (ARRGGGGGHHHH)!    You can laugh if you want, but I’m serious. 

Maybe you think you know what you want.  “I want a cottage garden”, or “I want to see flowers while I wash the dishes”.   Well.   That’s easy enough.   Mission accomplished, right?   Ha.   I guess a more honest title would be “Deciding what I want, figuring out if it will work within the confines of what I have, and then changing what I want to what will work (and still being what I want)”, but that’s a bit of a mouthful. 

That IS what we’re doing, though.  We’ll start with the dream.  ”I want a garden with several different kinds of gardens – a meditation garden, a cutting garden, an herb and vegetable garden – and paths that wander from one to the other, so that you only see one at a time and each is its own world”.    Well said.  Sounds nice.  Problem: the property is 60′ x 150′ and 60% of that is house and driveway.  (Things that make you say “Hmmmm”. )

So should you abandon this dream of a perfect garden just because you don’t have much space?  Absolutely not.  In fact, you should write it down.  Get yourself a notebook and call it MY GARDEN (or Our Garden, or Chrissy’s Garden or MeeMaw’s Garden or whatever).  On page one, write:  I would like a garden with _____________.   This is page one.  Don’t put anything on this page except what you would like in your garden.  If next week you think, “I’d really like a little shade and a table and chairs to sit with friends”, then add that to this page.  Don’t analyze it, don’t rule it out because of size restraints, just write it down.  This isn’t what you can do – this is WHAT YOU WANT.  There’s a difference.

So take the example above, with the many gardens and paths, add the seating in the shade, maybe add various places to sit as wander through the garden, add nice views from the house, add low maintenance.  Add wildlife sanctuary.  Dreaming?  Yes.  But that’s exactly the garden that we have created for ourselves here.  We have two sitting areas with tables (each area seats four people), an iron bench under a Japanese maple (seats two), a concrete bench under an arbor (seats two), several paths, 30′ of two foot high stone wall (seats … several), 16 trees of various kinds, 2 arbors, 3 trellises, two compost bins, 10 rain barrels, a worm bin and a 3 door tool shed.  And we’re a designated wildlife sanctuary.   And the dimensions mentioned above are the approximate dimensions to our property — and it isn’t crowded (in fact it’s just the opposite, calm and peaceful).  We can see cherry trees from our bedroom, a crape myrtle  from our kitchen and we can smell bourbon roses from our dining room. 

It’s possible.  Don’t give up your dream.  Write it down.  But you have to have a plan.   And it’s a lot easier and cheaper to do it and redo it and redo it again on paper than in dirt. 

So what do you want?   This is going to require some thought on your part.  Maybe you’ll need to go to the bookstore and read garden magazines.  Don’t read the books yet about plants.  Just look at gardens.  If you look at books, find the ones with lots of photos of finished gardens. 

Do you want views from the house?  Privacy?  Something for the neighbors to admire?  Lots of color?   Food?   Cut flowers for the house?   Lots of flowers? 

Next week:  What you want and what that means.  Will your dream fit your reality?

Filed under: Decisions, Planning a Garden