Design the Garden of Your Dreams: Four Landscaping Tips For Beginners

If your garden could do with a total overhaul, masterminding and carrying out the landscaping work on your own can be a massive undertaking. These expert landscaping tips for beginners will help you throw caution to the wind and craft your ideal outdoor haven.

Image Source: Pexels

Work Out What You Need and Want

What will you use the garden of your dreams for? Do you need space for your children to play? Would you like to host parties outside? Once you have your wishlist, you might need to juggle priorities to determine how to optimise the layout so your garden checks as many boxes as possible. 

Apply Familiar Design Principles

Many people who are confident and expressive with interior design baulk at the thought of redesigning their outdoor space. If you’re intimidated by your garden, try to put aside the fact that your garden is an outdoor space. Use your eye for design just as you would apply it inside your home. Think about space, light, colour, movement, and accents. And if you’re a pro at interior design, don’t forget that you’re allowed to bring the outside in, and the inside out. Consider outdoor furniture and lighting to create a special garden setting, and plant flowers specifically for the sake of bringing cut flowers into your home.  

Become Acquainted With The Sun

So you’ve designed your ideal garden. Great! But before you start digging up stumps and laying concrete for your patio, here’s a good test for whether you’re ready to remodel your garden. Stand outside and challenge yourself to point out the direction: North. 

If you don’t know your North from South, you haven’t thought of the sun’s position in the sky. If you had an intrinsic understanding of where the sun rises and sets in your garden every day, you would automatically be able to point North. If you can’t, it’s worth spending some time getting familiar with the sun’s journey over your garden, and understanding how your garden is affected every hour of every day. If you’re building a patio, you won’t get much use out of it if you choose a place that does not get enough sun, or a place that gets too much sun.

Photo by Matt Chen on Unsplash

Create a Focal Point

A key feature of arresting design in any artistic medium is a focal point. This is a feature that draws the eye and brings the rest of the scene into harmony. Creating a focal point is a professional design principle that is easy to apply if you have an eye for aesthetics, even if you don’t have professional training. Whether it’s a water feature or a tree with a rope swing, a striking feature will give your eyes something to rest on as you take in the richness and splendour of your beautiful landscape. 

Whether your garden is a patio and a few pots or acres of green space, redesigning your outdoor areas can be daunting without professional help. These tips will help you apply familiar principles and common sense to unfamiliar territory.