Design Your Dream Garden

What to expect from the Dream Gardens design course.

Before we get down to the nuts and bolts of your garden design, we need to get you feeling excited.

Now you know how you would like your garden to feel, and the different things you’d like to do out there, it’s time to sketch these (very roughly) onto your garden.

As you move through this course, creating a design for your garden, remember that even the best garden designs can (and probably should) always be changed or reworked.

Your borrowed view is everything that’s going on in your neighbours’ gardens. And it may be beautiful, or it may be awful.

It’s time to decide which plants you like (and want to keep), which plants are unhappy and not thriving (and need shifting), and which plants you hate (and want to remove).

Changing a sloped garden into a garden with levels (terraces) can be hard work but it is almost always so much better than sticking with your slopes.

We often think of our gardens as uniform environments, but really they are composed of many different microclimates, all influenced by the amount of sunlight they receive throughout the day and throughout the year.

We’re going to start working on your design using your garden maps. Once you’ve got a few ideas, we’ll test them out from within your garden.

One useful concept to work with when designing your garden is that of pools and streams. Pools are your living zones - the spaces where you rest, sit, play, and gather – like the slow-moving water in a big, wide river. Streams are the paths that connect the pools.

Now that we are thinking in terms of gardens with rooms and walls, the next ideas I want to introduce you to are those of windows, sight lines and focal points.

If you find the idea of creating a whole garden design overwhelming, this lesson will help you loosen up, offering ways to tinker with new layouts from within your garden, before you commit to any one design.

In the final module of this course, our focus will shift to your plants - how to select them and where to put them so that they bring out the best in your garden design. In this first lesson, we’ll look at choosing the right plants for your space.

Filling an entire garden with plants can be overwhelming. And, if you’re starting with a totally blank canvas, you might be surprised by just how many plants it takes to fill a garden. Instead of attempting to plant your entire garden in one go, I find it helps to think about planting it in the same way you’d build a body, starting with the skeleton - your trees.

Now that your trees are in, let’s talk about the rest of the plants you’ll need to finish building your garden’s ‘body’ - the muscles (perennial shrubs) and skin (small perennials, bulbs and ‘ephemerals’, or annuals).

There are many useful techniques you can try when it comes to placing your plants, that tend to work to create a garden that looks coherent, full but not chaotic, with plenty of colour, interest and life. That’s what we’ll cover in this, the final lesson of the dream garden design course.

A few final thoughts now that we have reached the end of our garden design course.