Picture the New Garden Before the Spade Goes In

There’s a particular thrill to planning a new garden, usually around February, when you’re sat indoors with seed catalogues and a cup of tea. It’s a big commitment as well, though, and not just of money. Once the sandstone patio’s been bedded in, the paths are down and a couple of trees have gone in, changing your mind means hiring a skip. So the gardens that turn out best tend to be the ones where somebody spent ages looking, measuring and daydreaming before a single sod was lifted.

Daydreaming is the hard bit, oddly. Take a fairly typical 1930s semi with a ten-metre garden: its owners might love the idea of a curved border and an oak pergola, yet have no real sense of how either would look from the kitchen sink on a grey Tuesday in March. What follows is how gardeners and designers tend to close that gap, roughly in the order they’d do it.

What’s the garden for, really?

Forget plants and paving for a minute and think about an ordinary week out there. Where do you sit with a morning coffee? Where’s the last patch of sun at seven on a June evening, when you want a glass of something? With young children around, there’s usually a football goal or a trampoline that will stay exactly where it is, whatever the plan says. Some households want a table for long lunches, others a couple of raised beds for runner beans and courgettes, and plenty just want somewhere to potter with the secateurs on a Sunday.

All of it is worth writing down, including the things that feel too small to mention, like where the bins have to live. A garden shaped around how you live will always beat one copied wholesale from Chelsea, however lovely that looked on telly.

Get the tape measure out

Every decent design starts with a rough plan drawn to scale. On it go the fences and hedges, the back wall of the house with doors and windows, any trees worth keeping, the general fall of the land, drains, and of course that manhole cover which always seems to sit right where the lawn should be. A few trips outside across one sunny day, at breakfast, lunch and teatime, will show where the light lingers and which corner by the fence never really dries out.

Neatness hardly matters at this point. Plenty of good gardens began life on a sheet of graph paper with a 30-metre tape and a pencil that needed sharpening. Where the garden slopes away from the house, even a rough idea of the drop is useful, because a couple of steps or a low sleeper wall changes the feel of the space as well as the quote.

Try ideas out on the ground

Then comes the fun part, which is laying ideas out on the lawn itself. A hosepipe flopped on the grass is the classic way to play with the curve of a new border, while bamboo canes and garden twine handle the straight lines. For a patio, many people borrow the landscaper’s trick of a can of line-marking paint, which washes out of the grass after a few mowings. Carrying two kitchen chairs out to the spot where the seating might go, and sitting there with a cup of tea for ten minutes, tells you more than any drawing. It’s also worth heading back indoors to look out from the sink, the sofa and the landing window, since that’s where the garden gets seen most of the year.

Problems tend to show themselves quickly that way: a path that would only take one person, a patio with no room for chairs once the table’s down, a border that brushes your legs each time the back door opens.

Seeing it finished, before it’s started

Marking out gives you the shape on the ground, but none of the height, colour or texture of the finished thing. For larger redesigns, a good number of garden designers and landscapers now go a step further and produce realistic 3D pictures of the finished, planted garden, which most clients find far easier to respond to than a plan view.

With decent landscape rendering, the new terrace, the planting and even a garden studio can be viewed from wherever the owner spends most time, so the kitchen window, the back step, or the old bench down by the compost bins. It earns its keep on questions of scale and colour: how tall a pergola can be before it looms, which buff or grey paving sits happily against red brick, and whether a garden room overwhelms a modest terrace.

A few designers even render the scheme in November light, which is a clever way of checking the border won’t be bare earth for half the year.

Give the plants time

Patience comes into it, of course. Show gardens and glossy images present everything grown in, whereas a real hedge or a young multi-stem birch can take anything from three to ten years to look like that. Thinking in three stages helps: the first summer, year three, and a decade on.

Shrubs and trees need space to spread, and in the meantime the bare patches can be filled with cosmos, foxgloves or quick perennials like nepeta and geraniums.

Get the hard landscaping right

Patios, paths, walls and steps soak up most of the money in a typical project, and they’re the hardest things to change later. Some useful rules of thumb from people who build gardens for a living:

A path for two people strolling side by side really wants to be a metre wide, a bit more if a wheelbarrow will be trundling along it.

A dining patio needs space for the table with chairs pushed out, plus enough room to squeeze round with a tray.

Paving samples are best judged outside, against your own walls, once dry and once after a downpour, since many stones change colour dramatically when wet.

And on heavy clay soils, drainage deserves attention right at the start, before the patio becomes a paddling pool every time it rains.

In the end

The gardens people remember are rarely accidents. They usually come from a household that knew how it wanted to use the space, measured it properly, spent a weekend or two shuffling hosepipes and canes around the lawn and, on the bigger jobs, saw the finished design on screen before anyone ordered a single tonne of sandstone. Give the planning a few weekends now and the garden will repay you for a good many summers.