How To Design Your Own Garden

This is the ultimate guide on how to design your own garden.

Deciding on a garden style is a daunting task. But knowing what style you want for your garden will help you select appropriate features. For example, modern style of garden designs could have stainless steel features such as water fountains and special lighting. A good rule of thumb for modern gardens is to keep them minimalist and sleek.

On the overhand, a traditional looking garden would have many flower beds and wooden type features. Very old properties may require a worn garden design such as old paving slabs and bricks.

Minimalist gardens are great for people with busy life styles. These types of customers usually want low maintenance gardens, consisting of few trees, plants and flowers to look after. It is also important to consider how a garden will be maintained in the future, below are some tips:

• Only plant what you are willing to trim and water. Also consider the amount of leaves that will shed in the winter months.
• Make sure paving or decking installation will be able to suppress weeds. Weeds growing through patios or decking can become annoying.
• Make sure the most appropriate paving slabs are chosen for the purpose. For example, paving for a BBQ area, swimming pool or drive will have different requirements. Patios for driveways may need sealing due to oil spills.

Features are essential to helping your garden look great and unique. However, make sure you select the right feature that matches your garden. Pay particular attention to electrical features due to routing of cables. Below are examples of garden features you may want to include in your design:

• Garden paving.
• Garden turfing.
• Garden storage facilities.
• Garden decking.
  
• Garden pond.
• BBQ area.
• Garden trees.
• Garden flower beds.
• Resin statues and animals.
• Garden work shed.
• Bird tables and houses.
• Garden bar area.
• Vegetable patch.
• Swimming pool.
  
• Hot tub area.

Garden drainage is very important. If you are completely renovating your garden, this is usually the starting point. The drainage solution you choose may have an impact on your design such as using soakaways, ACO drains, and under lawn drainage.

• Ensure you measure your garden thoroughly, before creating a scaled plan of your garden. This can be done simply using paper, pencil, ruler and tape measure.
• Use free garden design software to draw your design such as free garden design software package (by bluesmallprinter). Please note that you cannot save your design whilst using it for free. However, you can draw your design, then screen print it.
• Please note this software will only draw a 2D plan of your garden, which is usually all that is required. The program enables you to draw features such as walls, paving, flower beds, lawns, decking and more.
• Once completed, screen print and paste your design into a program such as paintbrush.
  
• Save your copied garden design.
• You can annotate your garden design with dimensions using paintbrush or word. This may be handy if you need to calculate the amount of materials needed such as paving slabs and gravel.

Below is an garden design created using the free design software tool recommended above. We designed this garden using the garden design principles outlined in this article.

Garden before

Removal of old patio slabs

Installation of drainage

Installation of drainage pipes

Base for new slabs

Base for new patio slabs

Garden before and after

Before and after of patio

Paving down side of house

Finished garden as a results of the how to design your own garden guide

New patio and lawn