Part 2 - Laying out your garden

Laying Out Your Garden - Part 2

Drawing a scale plan is a key way to visualise how your garden will look and ensure there's space for everything you need. Now we'll have a quick look at scales and tricks for laying out a garden that's a difficult shape.

When drawing out your layout, decide on a scale. This will give you a much more precise layout.

• E.g. 1cm on paper = 1m on the ground.
• Choose a scale so that your garden layout fills most of the paper.
• E.g. for a small garden, 1m might be represented by 2cm, 5cm or somewhere in between.

Tricky Shaped Gardens

A wide, shallow garden is one of the hardest to design – i.e. wider from side to side than it is long from the house to the end. The eye goes straight to the end rather than the areas on the left and right.

• You need to direct focus to the left and right to take the gaze on a journey.
• Add focal points to left and right as well as the end – can be a small tree, flowering shrub, bird bath, statue, urn, seat.
• Then decide your route and create paths to connect these focal points into a journey.
• Add some curves into the paths to avoid a straight-sided diamond.
• Add loose planting beds for the path to travel alongside, then refine your path depending which way round the beds you'd like to go.

Plant Directory

Euonymus species and cultivars

Japanese spindle trees

Hardy evergreen or deciduous shrubs or small trees

Celastraceae

Taxus baccata

Yew

Hardy evergreen tree

Taxaceae