First garden design with ZERO design experience

Ok, so I hadn't any design experience but I had spent the last few years maintaining customers gardens and I had seen some absolute gorgeous layouts and some not so desirable ones, some very functional designs and some completely non functional. When I first started my garden maintenance business I was taking on pretty much every job from mowing and slashing, tidy up of neglected areas, end of lease clean ups, you name it. The before and after pics of these jobs were always rewarding (check out some pics on Crimson & Clover garden Maintenance Facebook page)

Everyone one of these jobs taught me something in someway. Especially what NOT to grow and have in my own personal garden. Also, lucky enough in this line of work, when cutting back and tidying up my customers are always happy for me to take home divisions of plants or cuttings for propagation, which is exactly what I did, years before my husband and i even bought our block of land I was preparing plants for my 'one day' garden.

As soon as we purchased our 2200 square meter block of land i could start the design layout process. Once we decided on a floor plan for the house and we knew where it would sit i used graph paper to start my drawing to scale. Drawing to scale was a really important step as sizes of structures and plants can be very deceiving on a bare block. Time was definitely in my favor (whether i wanted it to be or not) we had lots of delays due to securing finance and then with the site development and build. This time meant i could observe the block in the wet seasons and the dry seasons. I could see exactly the direction of the sun rising and setting. This is all very important when planning a garden. Our property is on a slight slope and I was hesitant to have too much excavation done to the land as I was avoiding soil disturbance and changing the way the water naturally moves across the block. I learned when building a house and large shed that soil disturbance is inevitable.

I had plenty of drawings and ideas that over time changed due to the way certain areas had to be excaved for functionality.

Here are a couple of my very amateur early day garden design lay outs. Several changes have been made but the basic lay out generally stayed the same. The main idea was functionality. Zoning as per permaculture methods which I'm currently studying and had not much knowledge of at the time but the more i learn about permaculture is, its mainly common sense. More on this in future posts.

This layout is pretty much what we ended up with. I'm sharing these drawings, as amateur as they are to show you that you don't need to study a 600 hour garden design course to be able to sketch up what works for you. You do however need experience with plants, your soil and your climate to know what will work in the garden and what to plant where based on sun, shading, soil conditions,water/rain etc.

Here's a blurry zoomed in pic from google earth so you can see the similarities from my drawn layout to what is current. (although this google earth pic is 6 months old a lot has grown since then!)

You may notice the lack of lawn on the property. This was completely intentional and I'm still glad I made this decision early on. Personally I hate mowing lawns! I would much rather be weeding, mulching or pruning a garden that is offering biodiversity and benefiting native insects and birds than spending time mowing a lawn. I watch my neighbours spending hours on the weekends whipper snipping and mowing their huge blocks and am so grateful I can zip over mine in 15 minutes. The cooling factor of lawns are beneficial in built up areas but to be honest I couldn't imagine it being significantly hotter in my back yard then to my neighbours based on this. Also I have planted several large deciduous feature trees which I'm hoping will cast plenty of shade in summer in the years to come.

I went with a native inspired front garden, again not using any lawn but plenty of shrubs and ground covers. The front garden was predominantly planted out with tube stock. Mainly because I hadn't propagated any natives and also because besides the obvious fact they are cheaper, tube stock establish a lot quicker then a larger nursery plant would. Without going into too much detail I'll share a few pics of where it's at today.

It's completely ok if you have no idea where to start when it comes to garden design because if everyone was a natural and was as passionate about it as i am then i would be out of a job! I live and breathe gardening and I'm always more than happy to share ideas and work together with my clients to achieve the most suitable outdoor spaces for them.

In my next post I'm going to share some tips on how I built up the heavy clay soil and prepared the areas for planting.