Garden Design Process

As regular readers know, the Princess and I bought a place together last year and have decided to make a garden. (As if that’s going to come as a surprise to any of my friends or readers.)

The garden is going to be a lot bigger than most sane people will have but I thought I’d share the design process with you over a few posts and show you pictures of the garden development as it is built.

What I’m going to be showing you is a work in progress – it’s not the finished work. You’ll see the initial sketches, the thinking and the rough layouts as I go. The first thing to understand in this first series is that *everything* changes. Everything.

The initial thinking was that many of the herbs and plant collections could go into the space between the garage and guest cottage. This is not the case as you’ll see in later developments. The soil turned out to be extremely shallow and not workable in this area. So I have a choice of major construction here or giving up the thought of having a garden in this perfectly situated area. You know the choice.

So here’s drawing one from back in June when we decided to put a garden in this area. This is from one of my sketch books and wasn’t intended for publication (but these things change) – you’re getting the raw data I work from here and my original thinking. Remember things change.

This design was based on creating circles in the garden – laying out blocks of plants and putting them together in collections. Remember it was to be a collector’s garden.

And here’s the original area with Nole and his backhoe excavating for the garage area – he’s on bedrock with the excavation at that depth.