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Planning and Designing a Home Garden

After learning the basics of gardening, you can begin planning your garden. You must start by clearly conceiving a garden design. In your mind, what is the picture you have of your garden? All other gardening steps—the seeding, planting, grading and more—supplement the garden design.

Gardening Considerations

While the gardener should think of the garden as a picture, it should boast a clear landscape effect. Every properly landscaped yard should have a clear, central idea. Flowers and accessories should enhance the nature-like appearance of the garden. Too often, these things contradict the landscape effect. A yard that features scattered bushes and shrubs lacks a central idea. It is a nursery, not a garden.

A spacious lawn forms the foundation of a good landscape garden. You might have to adapt your planning to objects such as trees.

Other considerations include:

Consider the garden as a unit. Every feature should contribute to the whole. An architect who wants to improve a building does not simply add a chimney or a window. The architect studies the whole structure and makes improvements to enhance the entire building. Adding decorative ornaments or plants here and there is not landscape gardening.
Lawn and mass plantings construct the framework of the garden. Flowers serve as ornaments. They supply variety, color and emphasis.
Avoid scattering elements. Keep some open space in the center. Use the sides to act as a frame.
When planning a garden, don't be tempted to add plants just because they grow fast. Fast-growing plants often produce effects with little or no impact.
Plants have expressions. Train your eye to see the expressiveness of different plants, trees, shrubs and flowers.
Don't forget birds as part of the garden landscape. Think about places for birds to nest, feed and bathe.

To start planning a garden, sketch out the area available on paper. You can start identifying natural borders, obstacles to plan around (such as trees) and places to plant leading features of your garden. It is important to note points from which people will enter and exit the garden area.

The gardener then must determine the central feature in the space. For home gardeners, this is obviously the house. Landscaping elements should work to make the home the focal point of the garden design.

Growing a Garden

Planting should begin with trees and bushes with an eye toward keeping the center open and framing the garden border, emphasizing the home. Trees and bushes should grow freely in a natural way to achieve a continuous flow of form and color. They should not be pruned in such a way that they form separate, expressionless objects. Trees can also provide shade and protection for the home. Results are best when trees and bushes are closely incorporated into the general design of the residence.

After border masses are planted, flowers can be added. They appear most vibrant when planted against a background of foliage. The worst thing to do for flowers is to plant them in a flower bed on the lawn. That ruins the effect of both the flowers, which need a background, and the lawn, which needs to be free of clutter to avoid looking small. While a full flower garden should be planted toward the rear or one side, flowers can be placed along borders or other masses of foliage. Don't be stingy: Flowers are meant to be grown en masse.

Border planting of flowers helps establish boundaries and gives the homeowner a sense of living in the space, not on it. Perennials and wildflowers work well in flower borders. Easy-to-grow annuals such as marigolds and petunias can be sprinkled in.

Border planting is advantageous because the space, unless full, is always open for more planting. Symmetry is easy to maintain and little harm is done if a few weeds take hold.

Value of Garden Flowers

Plants hold value not only for their flowers but also their foliage. Remember this when planning a garden. A plant's importance is not so much tied to the plant itself as to the position it occupies and the way it enhances the structural design of the garden. One flower planted along a border can have a far greater impact than 20 flowers in the middle of the lawn. For instance, roses, while beautiful, are not highly valued in landscape gardening. The foliage is unattractive, the leaves are eaten by bugs and the blooms are quick to go. However, common flowers such as zinnia and gaillardias boast attractive foliage that make a garden interesting long before the flowers blossom.

Growing a garden involves more than planting and pruning. The best garden designs come from a true harmony with nature. A garden reflects the gardener and expresses his thoughts and feelings the same way a painting does for a painter.

Resources

Bailey, L.H. (2005). Project Gutenberg eBook of Manual of Gardening (Second Edition). Retrieved March 6, 2008, from the Project Gutenberg Web Site: http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/8mgrd10h.htm.

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