Landscape Gardening

Landscape gardening is to the gardener a blank canvas was to Van Gogh. It's an unblemished surface where creation and design is unique and can be portrayed in whichever form the gardener, as the artist, chooses to create it.

Like all forms of gardening, planning is essential. At least you’ll need to have at a least a rough idea of what it is you want to create.

Rolling hills and lawns that stretch to the horizon might be all well and good in theory, but to work it properly a plan must first exist somewhere, even if it is only in your mind. Without a proper plan the landscape gardener will fail in their attempts to create a work of art and the garden will resemble a bits and pieces affair with no real structure.

Since you have such a vast and empty canvas, the brave individual who undertakes landscape gardening, has before him a veritable plethora of ideas to choose from. Generally, I like to decide whether I want a normal garden or run a general theme throughout.

Perhaps a Chinese, Japanese theme or an Asian garden. Do I have wooded areas, or large sections of uncluttered space. Rock gardens, water features, gazebos, patios, decks, raised beds, or even a garden shed should be taken into account.

The list is endless, and all should be as visually stunning as the other. Resist any urges to jump right in into the deep end and start digging. There’s more to landscape gardening than meets the eye and patience does pay off.

I can’t stress enough how much planning you’ll need to do to before you start your landscape gardening project. You could of course forgo all that tedious planning and jump right in, but chances are you’ll get stuck even before you’re aware of it. A good example would be that lovely gazebo that was going for a song that you grabbed up before anyone else could. But now you find that it doesn’t fit anywhere within the confines of your garden. After all, it was cheap, what can you do?

So, now that you’ve started planning, you’ll need to decide what type of stuff you want to build the p;an up with in the. A sun dial, feature piece, a seating area? What about that lovely fountain you saw just the other day.

Once you've decided on the type of garden you want and roughly what items you want adorning each space, comes the real meaty part of landscape gardening.

You need to decide exactly where everything is going to be placed. In other words you’ll need to design the landscape of the garden, placing a pot there, a shrub here, a tall sapling in the corner, your sun dial in a suitably sunny place, perhaps even next to your fountain. Draw out a rough sketch of what should be where and once you've done that, what I like to do is set the sketch aside and do another, perhaps two or three others with completely different layouts.

Once your designing is finished, look at the sketches you've done and see which is really preferable, from both a visual point of view and also practical.

Landscape gardening is just like every other gardening project you’re likely to tackle, planning, hard work and then even more work will make the dream become reality. Starting a garden from scratch and seeing it come to fruition is the best part of gardening.