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Garden Plans, Design

By Sereba Agiobu-Kemmer
30 January 2016   |   5:50 am
CREATING a beautiful landscape is not as hard as you might thing. You don’t have to be a landscape designer to create a beautiful garden – but you do need to learn the basics of landscaping design to take the mystery out of designing your flower beds and borders.
Aloes-occupy-corner-of-garden-

Aloes occupy petite corner of garden

CREATING a beautiful landscape is not as hard as you might thing. You don’t have to be a landscape designer to create a beautiful garden – but you do need to learn the basics of landscaping design to take the mystery out of designing your flower beds and borders.

Canna-lilies-with-their-large-foliage-and-showy-blooms-are-good-choice-for-tropical-styled-garden-landscape

Canna lilies with their large foliage and showy blooms are good choice for tropical garden landscape.

Designing a Garden Plan
Before you start planting, you need to create a garden plan. When designing a home garden landscape, the most important step is to put a plan on paper. Developing a master plan will save you time and money and is more likely to result in a successful design. A Master plan is developed through the design process, a step-by-step method that considers the environmental conditions, your desires, and elements and principles of design. The goal is to organize the natural and man-made features in your garden into an aesthetic, functional, and environmentally sustainable landscape.

Start by using graph paper and drawing a plan of your garden
Site to scale. Plot every feature you find on your site, both natural and those your predecessors have put in place. Use a measuring tape to get approximate measurement.

Fire-pit-barbeque-idea-garden-

Fire pit barbeque idea in garden.

The Design Process:
The five steps of the design process include: conducting a site inventory and analysis, determining your needs, creating functional diagrams, developing conceptional design plans and drawing a final design plan. The first three steps establish the aesthetics, functional, and horticultural requirements for the design. The last two steps then apply those requirements to the creation of the final landscape plan.

The process begins with a site invention and analysis of soil, drainage, climate conditions and existing vegetation. This is a critical step for both plant selection and placement and locating family activities and functions. It’s important because the same climate conditions that affect the plants – temperature, humidity, rain, wind and sunlight – also affect you, the user. The next step is to make a list of your needs and desires this helps you determine how your garden and landscape will be used.

The site and user analysis will also help you establish a theme for the form and style of your design. The functional diagram is then used to locate the activity spaces on the site and from this diagram a conceptional plan is developed. The last step is a final design that include all the hardscape and planting detail that are necessary for installation.

Colorful-flower-border-of-geraniums,-blackeye-suzanes-coleus-and-hostas

Colorful borders of geraniums, black eyed suzannes, coleus and hostas.

Study your current plan carefully and decide which features you want to incorporate into your final plan, which ones you want to highlight, and which one you want to downplay or remove.

Place a piece of tracing paper over your plan and sketch in or leave out various features and designs.When designing your garden plan, you don’t have to get bogged down in details, listing every plant by name. Instead: ‘sun loving perennials’, ‘blue and yellow bed’, or ‘pots of annuals’ may do.

With your sketch in hand, your next step is to decide which area you want to start with and to roll up your sleeves. Break big projects down to manageable pieces, and do them one at a time.

Clever--idea,-pavillion-for-outdoor-living-in-the-garden

Clever idea to build pavilion for outdoor living and entertaining.

Like rooms in a house, a garden area has four major elements in this order:
Floor: Lawn grass, a ground cover, paving materials, or good, plantable soil.
Walls: Supplied literally by a wall of your house, by a fence, hedge, or trellis, or by backdrop of every greens or shrubs of kind.

Ceiling; can certainly be open sky but may also involve an umbrella awnings, overarching tree or large-shrub branches or a pergola with or without a cloak of plants.

Furniture; Tables and chairs, and benches and the like but also major containers or garden. Container or garden ornaments and décor.
Limit yourself to one or two ornaments and keep focus on the sense of space and living parts of your garden.

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