If you have something on your wish list, what does that mean as far as your plan goes?  For instance, let’s say that you want a cutting garden so that you can have freshly cut flowers in the house.  A cutting garden means sunshine.   At least 6 hours of direct sunshine.  More is better.  Do you have a place that gets that much sun?  

Suppose you want a cottage garden in the front of your house.  A cottage garden is quite a bit of work.  Do you have the time, the sun and the inclination for that?  Never mind the skill.  You’ll pick up the skills as you go along.  If you don’t have the time…. well, you’re not going to pick time up along the way, are you?  

See what I mean?   If you say that you want a rose garden, then you have to realize that rose gardens are not easy.  And it’s difficult to be organic with roses. 

If you want low maintenance, then you should know that you probably are not going to have a lot of flowers.   Flowering trees or shrubs, sure.   Color even, but not much from flowers, because flowers take a lot more work than hostas and ferns and such.  The good news is that a well planned shade garden isn’t much work at all.  Some work in the spring and fall, but not much during the rest of the year.  And it’s way less work than a grass lawn.  

Here’s a tip for keeping maintenance down.   Use native plants.   Find out which plants are native to your area and use those.   They’ve adapted to your conditions and usually don’t require much help once they get established.  In my area we see lots of dogwoods and crape myrtles, for instance.  They’re easy here.  

And any of these things are going to take a certain amount of work in the beginning.   Even if you’re basically planting trees to shade a patio, the trees will have to planted and mulched and watered and shaped for a few years.

Every plus has a minus, and vice versa.  Roses, thorns (and aphids).  One of my favorite garden things was when we had the short walk from the sidewalk to the porch lined on both sides by a two foot wide swath of daffodils.  The two weeks they were in bloom were glorious.  The month after they bloomed, while the stalks were up but dying (and couldn’t be cut back because that’s where they store the energy for the next year), was not so glorious.  My wife hated that part.  It wasn’t my favorite either, but I sure loved those two weeks.  (We no longer have daffodils lining the walkway.  Sigh.) 

So this is where we start actually adding things to our plan – putting them on the plat.  We’re going to start with large general areas and hardscaping.   Since every garden is different in size, scope and intent, I’ll use our own garden as the template. 

Next week:  putting plan to paper.

Filed under: Planning a Garden