Follow these 20 perfect garden tips to sketch out garden landscapes that are sure to flourish with minimal upkeep and without pricey do-overs.
20 Tips for Planning the Perfect Garden
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Planning the Perfect Garden
Die-hard gardeners will tell you that a garden is a work in progress. Even established gardens require a little tweaking from season to season. Plan thoughtfully before planting, and your landscape will thrive for years without costly or time-consuming changes.
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Take Advantage of Leafless Panoramas
With most trees and shrubs showing only bare bones, winter is a fine time for spotting ho-hum holes in your landscape. Add winter interest with evergreens, berry shrubs, or trees with unique bark to boost your garden’s year-round appeal.
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Know Your Site
Spend a day or two checking how many hours of sun your gardens receive each day to ensure you incorporate light-appropriate plants into your design. “Observe the area over the course of a day and note how much sun it gets, starting early in the morning (around 8 or 9 AM),” says Trisha Singh, vice president of product at Garden for Wildlife. “Another method is to download a sun-tracking app on your smartphone that can use your phone’s camera and GPS to estimate the amount of sun a specific area will receive.”
Remember that full-sun plants require at least 6 hours of sun, partial-shade plants need between 3 and 6 hours and shade-tolerant plants benefit from 2 or 3 hours of direct light or from receiving indirect or filtered light all day.
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Consider the Big Picture
Sketch an overall picture of your yard, including entertainment areas, your house and other buildings. Enlarge the sketch and mark off landscape features like trees, shrubs and gardens. Pencil in proposed plantings to see how they fit within the existing landscape.
Design extra-deep borders large enough to house an array of low, medium and tall plants. It will allow you extra space to add more plants as the mood strikes.
Before you sketch, estimate the space you wish to dedicate to a planting bed. Use the measurements to draw a blueprint to scale on graph paper. Considering plants’ mature sizes, pencil in desired plants to get a realistic idea of how many you can fit into the space.
On your plan, use markers, watercolors or colored pencils to color in existing plantings. Then color in your planned additions to ensure that the old and new hues complement each other.
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Make Like a Landscape Pro
Design gardens that carry the eye from earth to sky. Anchor borders and beds with structural plants, such as trees or tall shrubs, and then layer in climbing vines, smaller shrubs, varying-height perennials and sprawling ground covers.
When planning your design, include pathways, arbors, ponds, large containers, fountains, statuary and garden benches that draw both foot traffic and attention through the garden.
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Settle on a Style
Determine whether you’re going for a clipped formal look, casual cottage appeal, a native prairie or a combination of styles.
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Pick a Palette
Are you partial to pastels? Do red-hot hues get your creative juices flowing? Working within a color scheme will help you set a cohesive scene and prevent you from buying unsuitable plants in weaker moments. “Decide what colors you want in your garden ahead of time,” says Joyce Corbett of Classic Courtyards. “Try using colors that are next to each other on the color wheel. They’re more likely to work well together visually.”
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Cultivate Perennials for Pennies
Designate a sunny corner for growing perennials from seed. Sow the seeds in early spring, and by mid- to late summer, you’ll have plenty of plants to fill out your borders.
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Add Raised Beds for Vegetable, Herb and Cutting Gardens
Growing your produce and easy-care annual flowers for summer arrangements saves money. Plus, raised beds take less time to weed.
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Create a Budget
Determine how much you want to spend for this year’s plantings, mulch and soil amendments. Learn more in our mulch guide. Plan on putting in paths and buying the larger, structural plants first. When budgets are tight, think about filling in your design over the course of several years.
Many spring garden catalogs offer inexpensive bare-root forsythia, hydrangea and redtwig dogwood saplings. The stick-like, rooted saplings take a few years to fill out and flower, but their bargain-basement prices allow you to mass their forms inexpensively or to add them throughout the landscape as a repeating element.
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Forget the Finicky
Opt to include native plants or hardy and reliable ones in your planting zone. You won’t have to replace them down the road.
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Invest in Gardener’s Gold
Incorporate plants—such as daylily, hosta, bearded iris, bee balm, purple coneflower and yarrow—that you can divide in a few years for more plants.
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Think Foliage, Not Flowers
Sketch in plants with silver, gray, chartreuse, variegated and bright-colored foliage for gardens that remain colorful as flowers fade.
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Consider Every Season
Slot in plants with different bloom times to ensure a succession of blossoms throughout the year.
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Plant a Living Wall
Pencil in trellises, hedges and plant groupings to camouflage unattractive views, define garden rooms and buffer traffic noise.
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Supersize It
You’ll fill a lot of space without spending big bucks if you include large, quick-growing plants, such as Russian sage, fountain grass, Autumn Joy sedum, hydrangea and shrub roses like Carefree Delight, Knock Out and Magic Carpet.
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Contemplate Companions
Also, peruse garden books, plant catalogs and search online for garden images that showcase appealing plant combinations that you can duplicate in your design.
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Pair Like-Minded Plants
Group those with similar light, water and soil requirements together—if you plant water-thirsty cultivars with drought-tolerant plants, you will likely lose one or both to too-dry conditions or root rot.
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Enhance the Wow Factor
Add one or two plant groupings or shrubs for curb appeal that will stop passersby in their tracks.
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Vary Forms and Textures
Finally, incorporate plants with ferny fronds, grassy spires, coarse spikes, fuzzy foliage, waxy surfaces and broad leaves in varying mounded, cascading and upright forms.
FAQ
What’s the best time of year to start a garden?
Spring is an ideal time to start a garden, but early fall can also work because soil temperatures are still warm.
How do I know if my soil is healthy?
The best way to determine the health of your soil is to gather a few samples and have them tested by your local Extension Services program. Contact your county extension office for more information.
About the Experts
- Joyce Corbett is the owner of Classic Courtyards in West Springfield, Massachusetts. She has over forty years of landscaping design and installation experience.
- Trisha Singh is the vice president of product at Garden for Wildlife, a program run by the National Wildlife Federation, which encourages wildlife-friendly gardening spaces. Trisha is a wildlife biologist who enjoys native plant gardening and helping to support others in their native gardening pursuits.
