Designing your small garden. Useful tips & ideas. Sketch to reality.

Use this step by step guide to help with your own ideas for your small garden:

• Make a list of all your families wishes regarding the garden. Consider carefully when choosing among these features whilst catering for everyone if possible.

• Retain already existing, established stands of trees or shrubs.

• Be well informed of any existing laws or regulations, particularly when it comes to minimum distances from boundaries.

• Get information from gardening books and nursery catalogues before choosing materials and plants and also compare prices.

• Draw a sketch of your plot and outline all buildings, windows and  doors and also include all neighbouring buildings and trees. By laying a piece of transparent paper over the drawing sketch in your garden ideas. You can make as many plans as you like and can use as many transparent paper as possible. These days there are many computer programs to help with landscape design.

• Experienced landscape gardeners will be able to answer all your questions but might be very expensive.

• Slopes or gently inclined banks in a brand new garden should be created after the basic structure of the building has gone up.

• A patio, a sitting area, walls and paths, pergola location and support frames and fences are some of the first things to build before starting to excavate the ground.

• You can now till or dig the soil and perhaps order some high quality top soil to improve the plant holding capacity of the ground. Remember that your garden is going to be around for a long time and the more you prepare the soil for the long tem the more your plants, trees and shrubs will flourish.

• Improve the soil if necessary to increase drainage with sand and in the planting areas with good organic gardening compost. At the very least when digging holes for individual plants a good helping of compost along with some suitable fertiliser should be added to the soil used to backfill the hole after planting.

• First plant the larger trees and bushes, then fruit trees and herbaceous perennials, with ground -covering plants last. Take special notice of how big the plant will be when fully grown. Most people add too many shrubs to their garden because they think the space is too much. Later when the small garden has developed some of these shrubs will have to be removed from the garden.

• Plant perennials, summer flowers, vegetables and herbs in the remaining spaces. Make sure that you know the requirements for light of the different plants that you going to use. Start planting right away if you doing this work in spring and if you creating the garden in autumn give the soil a boost by planting green fertilizer plants first.

• Sow your garden lawn only once the beds have been created.