Putting Your Design on Paper
(step three)
~Note – I designed my Garden Design Workbook with Templates to make this part of the process easier. It includes more information than what is included here, as well as many pages of usable templates.
Otherwise, you can continue here with a regular notebook.~
It’s time to begin the process of making your dream garden really happen.
Go back to the photos you collected back in Step 1—physical photos, Pinterest pins, etc., and look with more scrutiny at the pictures you’ve collected.
Which elements do you absolutely want to keep? Which ones are only mildly important? Edit out the things you don’t love and keep only the pictures and concepts that really speak to you. If you’re going to be doing a lot of work—and you will—you don’t want to be working your butt off for a garden you don’t truly love.
Combine these elements with the information you gathered about your site and you will have the information you need to create your blueprint.
For this stage of the design process, you’ll need a long measuring tape (or laser) and some graph paper.
Go outside and take measurements of your garden space and write them down in your notebook. You need width, length, and depth.
Putting your garden space on graph paper, accurately represented using a specific ratio, allows you to play around with your design before doing the hard work outside.
Take your measurements inside and use them to create a scaled-down blueprint plan of your garden space. You can decide whichever ratio you like, but I like to use 2 squares on the graph paper to represent 1 foot in real life (which means one square = 6 inches).
For example, if my space is 30 feet wide, that would be 60 squares wide on my paper. You will want your entire garden space represented on your paper, so you may need to tape a few pieces of graph paper together, especially if your yard is large.
You may use a different ratio of you prefer, but be consistent no matter what you use.
You can use my Garden Templates to overlay onto your garden Blueprint to easily visualize how things fit together and which colors you like beside one another.
After your entire garden space is represented on graph paper, you have a place to start adding your plants to the blueprint and rearranging to create the perfect garden layout.
To add plants, you will use the same ratio method described above and create paper plant templates to overlay on top of your garden blueprint. Make sure you use the same ratio you used for the garden bed layout! Use a compass to create circles to represent plants, then cut those out and play around with organizing your paper plants until you come up with a design you like.
In order to make this process easier, I’ve created printable plant and landscape templates that you can download, print, color, and cut out – you can find the link to my digital products on my Digital Products page. You can draw the entire thing yourself , but my downloadable pages will save you a bit of time in the design process.
NOTE ~ To keep this page manageable in size, I have created a separate Garden Design Basics page. On that page I will discuss a few basic garden design principles that apply to any garden.
After your garden is all designed, your blueprint marked up and colored, and you are happy with the layout, next you will start the actual building of your garden, but first let me tell you what tools you’ll need (next page).