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Designing Your Garden Landscape Plans Should Include Your Own Secret Garden Album

Updated on January 22, 2015

The first step to designing a perfect garden and landscape

For many homeowners, renters, and folks like you and me that love to garden. The simple task of getting started on a new gardening or landscaping project is often a bit of a challenge, but it need not be. Let us face the facts, with all the decisions on what plants will work in full sun or which plants are best suited for use in partial to full shade. What colors will work with the color of the brick, trim or siding is something many of us simply shy away from for a variety of what we believe in our mind anyway, to be good reasons. Then there are all the decisions we must make as to which types of ground cover, mulch and hardscapes are best for our garden or landscape beds. How do we keep it all straight in our mind? The closely guarded secret used by professional designers we to should use, designing your garden landscape plans should include your own secret garden album, filled with specific ideas we want and need to incorporate in our garden and landscape


Beautiful lawns gardens and landscapes start with garden design
Beautiful lawns gardens and landscapes start with garden design

Developing a custom garden design

Ok, let us get this party started, and have a lot of fun with the entire process of creating our own secret garden album while designing our own garden landscape plans. One extremely important thing we will want to remember, the vision we have of what our wants, needs and dreams are, we need from our landscape, flower gardens, vegetable garden mixed in with the other plantings or a putting green or what ever your heart desires.


Be true to your style

1. First, something we should keep in mind and a word of caution, today, as in times gone by, our outdoor living and garden spaces should be a direct reflection of our homes interior design. Be it, formal, modern,Mediterranean, or eclectic. We absolutely must remain true to our home interior design, color, scale, and equally important, we do not want to neglect our home architecture style.


Break out your digital camera

2. Where to start, simple, break out the digital camera, and take several high quality pictures of your home. Start with the best wide-angle view of the front of the house from the middle of the street if you will, keeping your homes curb appeal in mind is a great place to start and makes a great cover shot for our secret garden album. Think of it as the before picture, of your makeover success story you will enjoy reliving each time you tell someone about your gardening and landscaping projects around your home.


Divide master plan into small projects

3. To make spaces easier to manage; our garden album should begin by breaking the big picture, down into smaller manageable pictures focused on prominent areas of the house. Relying on your homes architecture design will influence what features of your home catches your eye first. Be it the front entry, or stoop if you prefer, front door, concrete or brick paver walk, covered porch, all being well designed not only direct visitors to our front door, as an added bonus, our garden welcomes them into our homes with beautiful blooms, sweet fragrances and well manicured shrubs, bushes, ornamental or fruit trees and outdoor furniture.


Take a lot of Digital Photos

4. Remember to treat the front, back and each side of your home and yard as you would different rooms in your home, take high quality photos of the front, back and left and right sides of your home lawn and gardens capturing every ugly little detail in the photos. The heat pump and air conditioner compressor, backup generator, windows, doors, gutter down spouts and even the ugly rain barrels or garden shed, wood privacy fence and garden gate, trellis and arbor are easily incorporated into our great looking, functional garden design.


One HD pic is worth a thousand words

5. Organizing your home lawn and garden photos into groups, take the front of the house for instance. Start the first section of your garden photo album with a wide-angle photo as the first picture in your garden album. Then break the front of the house picture down into smaller focal areas with the use of pictures of each architectural element focusing on the, doors, windows, walks and finishes. Such as brick, stone, vinyl, aluminum cedar or concrete siding and trim color, will make our garden and landscape designing process much easier to conceptualize and develop into the garden of our dreams. Keep in mind, baby steps at first will make the process easier and the garden and landscape project go much smoother.


3 steps - professional garden & landscape design

Professional garden and landscape designers agree, you absolutely must include these 3 items in your garden album

One Picture says a Thousand Words

1. Color pictures, we have discussed the importance of pictures of our home, garden, landscape, and other design elements around our home. Let us not forget to include pictures of the design elements we wish to incorporate into our lawn, garden, and landscape designs.

Collecting photos of design elements, you find to your liking in garden and landscape design magazines are not only a great way to get a bit of creative inspiration. Adjusting the photo sizes up or down a bit to match the scale of things makes it easier, to visualize how that anchor planting and set of outdoor furniture will look in your landscape.

Scaled Drawings

2. Scaled drawings, size really matters when it comes to garden and landscape designs. Much like a large banquet style dining table overwhelms the small eat-in kitchen. Likewise, a large pool in the backyard will overpower a small landscape and garden space.

Starting with a piece of graph paper, you know what I mean, right? The paper with all the little squares lightly outlined making it look like a checkerboard. Anyway, I find graph paper works well to layout the overall dimensions of the space you are planning your garden design.

First on the graph paper, establish the perimeter of the space. The graph paper makes it easy to layout irregular shapes; remember plotting a slope in algebra class? Well here, you go you did not waste your time learning that stuff.

Start by adding your must have elements those special features you have been dreaming about, your design will focus around their placement in the space you have available.


Designing your Garden Landscape

Flexible planning is key to success

3. A plan, please do yourself a huge favor straight away, remember any worthwhile, workable garden landscape plan, must have a reasonable amount of flexibility, its that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong thing, call it Murphy’s law if you will.

In many cases, a simple thing such as the weather will affect your time line, your plan. Special ordered materials will not be delivered when promised. Something will inevitably be damaged in shipping or missing important bits and pieces from a broken container. Sometimes you will get a bit of worse luck and both will occur in the same shipment.

Allow yourself time to manage these little bumps in the road, think of it this way for a moment, situations such as these make for interesting stories. Especially when all is finished with a particular section of your garden landscape design, you know the ones I mean. After all, you did spend much of your creative time depicting down to the last detail in your secret garden album. Where you, your friends and family enjoy a few well-deserved adult beverages, a spot of tea, a bit of good spirited ribbing, and make plans for your next garden landscape project.




Design plan and make the most of your DIY projects

For the beginner and master gardener, homeowner, DIY minded people like you and me, designing your garden landscape plans should include your own secret garden album. By any other name, is it a diary, your journal or collection of magazine clippings of your wants and dreams

Discover how easy a secret garden album will make designing your garden landscape fun for all involved, a learning experience for you your friends and family, and finally yet importantly, let us not fail to mention, create lasting fond memories you will cherish.


Enjoy designing your garden landscape. Mike


working

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