You need three things:  your wish list, a copy of your plat showing what’s on your property  (house, drive, trees, major shrubs, etc) and a copy of the plat to use for starting your plan.  If you did a map of the sun’s movement across your property, you may as well have that out also.

Let’s start with your wish list.   Have you reconciled what you want with what is possible?   At this point you should have decided whether or not you have the sunshine for a flower or vegetable garden (or enough shade for hostas and ferns).  If not, then you have to decide if you can add or eliminate some shade.  This might be by planting (or removing) a tree or two.  If the shade is from a neighbor’s house or trees, then forget it.   The decision to have a shade garden has been made for you.   MOST lots, however, have a mix of shade and sun, so you only have to put each type in the appropriate place.  So if you feel that you have the proper conditions for what you want, then we’ll proceed.  If you don’t have the proper conditions but can fix it, we’ll still proceed (and plan the changes later).   If you can’t adjust your conditions (by planting or removing trees for instance), then you have to adjust what you want.  Back to square one.  Go ahead.  We’ll wait. 

Getting back to the wish list, and using our own garden as an example:   One of the primary wishes for our garden was that we would be able to stroll through it and come upon various changes.  Meander would be the proper word.  In our favorite large gardens around the world, we’ve liked best those gardens whose paths and bridges led to completely different styles of gardening – a Japanese garden leads to a rose garden which leads to a water garden which leads to an Italian garden and so on.  We especiallly liked those that kept the next garden hidden until you crossed the bridge or rounded the bend.  The Butchart Gardens near Victoria, British Columbia comes to mind.  Of course our little garden is far too small for the “Butchart effect”, but that’s the idea we had.    

We also wanted to be able to sit here and there to chat with friends or just enjoy the solitude.   A place to gather with drinks and hors d’oeuvres or maybe even have our morning breakfast.  

These were the things that were most important to us, so this is where we started on our map.  We penciled in the sections that would make nice “areas” (either a garden area or a seating area).  We laid out our paths to get as much distance through them as possible (they meander).  We wound up with a drawing with overlapping ovals and circles and a long curving line running along and between them (the path).  We hadn’t decided which type of garden went where yet, but we knew that that would be at least partially dictated by the conditions of each area. 

Then, just to try to get the feel for what we were doing, we unrolled every water hose we had and used those to lay out the map onto the ground.  When we ran out of hose, we used whatever was on hand.   We’ve seen people use powder (like lime) but we wanted ours to stay on the ground for a while so that we could contemplate it a little longer.   You can get computer programs for this, by the way, that are really good, but we chose to do it the old fashion way.   Sherry and I would walk along our water hose paths and talk about how well it flowed, or what the problems might be, and we adjusted it here and there until we arrived at something that we felt gave us the “feel” we were looking for.

Filed under: Planning a Garden