Home » Plants & Animals » Small Space Gardening » Planning Your Small Garden

Planning Your Small Garden

© Valerie Adolph

Planning Your Small Garden

For many of us, gardening pleasures during the cold of winter are few and far between. But one of the greatest garden pleasures warms our heart during December and January. That's garden planning - curling up beside a glowing fire with a glass of eggnog surrounded by plant and seed catalogues, dreaming of how perfect the garden will be this coming summer.

It will be a blaze of colour from March to October; it will be an intimate bower for entertaining friends; it will have that new water feature. You can see it all in your mind's eye as you sip away and flip the catalogue pages with clean finger nails. Your back isn't sore either, so this must be the depth of winter.

As you try to choose between the gorgeous roses and the flamboyant day lilies, back off a bit and consider the basics. If your garden is established and you just want to improve it, grab a notebook and finish some sentences.

I want my garden to look more..... than last year so I will...... Because I want my garden to look larger I will..... The best feature of my garden is......so I will do....to enhance it. The three garden items I will improve this year are ...1...2....3

If you're starting from scratch, buy or borrow a book on garden planning. Decide first on the "bones" of your garden. Consider the perimeter - is it open or enclosed? If you don't like it, how can you change it? Can you have a big, thick hedge removed? Can you conceal an ugly brick wall by planting vines against it? Could you mark the boundary with a low hedge of lavender? If it's a roof garden do you need to put up trellises to protect your plants from the wind?

Decide on the kind of garden you'd like. Do you prefer a definite style such as Japanese with water, serenity and few flowers, or Mediterranean with plants that like heat and not too much water? Does your climate, soil or exposure place limits on what you can grow? Be sure you know what these limitations are and visit a local botanical garden for ideas about how to deal with them.

Is yours going to be a garden of abundance with lots of plants? Plan carefully on graph paper so you don't make the common mistake of buying too many plants. Make sure that the plants that will eventually grow larger don't block your view of plants that remain small. Let your abundance spread to vertical planes - up surrounding walls and fences. Remember to have a strong focal point so your eye is drawn in a specific direction and your focus isn't lost among all the greenery.