Everybody want a nice garden design at their home or properties. A nice and good looking garden will make your home more cheerful as well as more valuable.
There are many people who likes to do gardening, however not many people know how to design their garden correctly.
Planting plants and doing gardening without any proper planning will end up with your garden to look messy and untidy.
Proper choice of a design and gardening plants are very crucial for you to have not only beautiful garden but also a sustainable garden.
A good garden will make the maintenance works to be easy and will require less cost to maintain the garden.
For a professional landscape architects or landscape designers, there are a lot of factors and theories in determining the design of a landscape or garden area.
However, for us as a home owner who only going to design our own properties, we do not have to go into too much details as them as we are not going to design a large space of area.
They are a few factors that determining a good design of a garden, and if you could follow it, it will enough for you to produce a nice and beautiful garden. The factors are as follows:
1. Garden Concept
The first thing that you need to think off when deciding to design your garden is the garden concept.
The concept of your garden will determine the layout of your garden and the plants that are going to be planted.
A concept is going to be the base of your design. Everything that you are going design must be based on the concept that you have chosen.
If you still blur about the design concept, just think something like English garden, Japanese garden, french garden and modern garden design.
That are all just an example, just think about the concept of a garden that you want to have around your properties.
Without having this vision really clear in your mind, you will not getting right in your designing process.
After you have got this, you can now start to browse the garden design with that concept in books, magazines or websites to get some ideas oh what you can do in your garden.
Let’s just say that you are choosing a Japanese garden design concept for an example, now you should have know what type of plants that were usually used and what are the most common elements that usually have in a Japanese garden.
You should also observed how a Japanese garden usually built up is it symmetrical or asymmetrical. How was the plants planted, are they in the form of bonsai or topiary or just a free growing plants.
As up to this phase you should already be able to do a little bit of sketching of your garden design with type of plants based of the garden concept that you want.
The second factor that you need to take into account when designing a garden is the space.
Space plants a very plays a very important role to be took into account for to create a garden that has a good accessibility, practical and clean.
Try to define specific spaces around your garden by identifying it based on the suitability of your area.
Create spaces such playing area, sitting area, walking area and any other spaces that you think suitable to be existed around your garden. Try to be as practical as you can be.
From here, after you have defined all the spaces that you think suitable, you now can try to do a little bit of plants arrangement around the spaces that you have created.
This does not that you have to create something like a room or what ever in your garden. Just a simple allocation of spaces for each activity.
This is to make it easier to choose plants for planting design. For example, spaces that you allocated for sitting area could be planted with shading trees so that it could help to give shade under the hot sun.
At this stages, you should already have a clear picture of the garden concept, garden spaces and planting design of your garden area.
Your sketches of your garden plan could also improving and clearer by this time.
3. Planting Purposes
Before you start doing planning of the plants and making arrangement of them on your plan, it is good for you to first understand and try to implement the panting purposes techniques.
Try to identified the needs of your garden such as the needs of screening or the needs of fencing or any other needs.
From that needs, try to arrange your plants to fulfill all the needs that you have identified.
The plants that you want to choose should also be suitable for the purpose of the planting. You do not want the plants that you chose for fencing purposes are too small that it will not serve the purpose of its planting.
You should also consider the condition of the area of plantings such as the amount of the sunlight or the amounts of traffic that area will received.
At this stage you can you creativity in selecting and arranging the plants. It is up to your to choose the type of the plants whether flowering plants, topiary plants or bonsai plants.
Just arrange them in the most beautiful arrangement you can. Looking of examples anywhere you can is a good thing to do to have some ideas.
This is to make sure that your chosen plants could live healthily at the area you want them to be planted.
You need to plan all the plants to solve all the needs of your garden first before planning the plantings for decoration purposes so that it will not contradict between each other.
Another important aspect when designing your garden is your maintenance budget and works.
You do not want to design and build a garden that you cannot maintain it at the end. It is just a waste of time and money.
A few things that you can do is try choose plants that requires less maintenance such as trimming and pruning or any other maintenance works.
You can also choose to plants a lot of perennial plants compare to annual plants so that you do not have to change regularly.
Maybe you can also put in some automation system such sprinkler and automatic watering timer to help you in doing the maintenance works.
Besides the maintenance of the plants, maintenance of the hardscape features should also be taken into consideration.
As a conclusion, it is not hard that hard for you to do your own garden design. You just need a little bit of information and proper planning.
If you got stuck in the process at at any stages, just try do it a few times and also try to look for some design examples that you can follow.
If you have any questions or even suggestions please feel happy to write it the comment section below. I will surely get back to you.