It’s an old adage I know but… ‘If you fail to plan, you plan to fail’ and it’s no different with gardening.

Maybe you’ve just moved into your new house, or maybe you’re just planning to revamp the existing garden, but if you want your garden to appear in a certain style, whether that’s mature, fun or formal, you’ll need to plan it out if you’re to achieve the look you want.

Some people call it landscaping if it’s large and formal, but the terms applies equally well to smaller gardens at the back of your own house. Whether you prefer the term ‘garden design’ or ‘landscaping’, there’s more to it than just planting a few trees and plants and hoping for the best, or you’ll be wasting your time and money.

Your goals should be to:

Organise and develop your garden for your maximum enjoyment
Create the visual effect you want
Ensure the maintenance is to a level you can cope with

How to decide what you want:

Think about how you use the space at the moment and how you’d like to use it
Think about what materials you’d like, would you like pots and marble, stone or wood?
Think about how the garden will fit in with the house and surrounding environment

How to plan your garden:

Draw or sketch a plan of the garden, keep it as much to scale as you can, graph paper is quite useful for this
Unless you intend to start from scratch, plot all the major features on the garden that will stay, such as a path, pond, terrace, trees, etc
Now put some tracing paper over the top so you can draw in different ideas for your garden. This way, you can try several looks without having to keep starting again and you’ll be able to show your ideas to other family members or others to get opinions and ideas

Point to note: bear in mind how the sun moves over your house – you don’t want to be putting a sun terrace in the shade!