Planning Your Small Garden
If you prefer a contemporary look you'll be thinking of straight lines and a few choice plants carefully placed. Restraint is the watchword and the angles between the straight lines need to be exactly 90 degrees and not somewhere close to 90 degrees. A formal look is somewhat similar with tiny, impeccably-trimmed boxwood, topiary, perhaps a few elegant lilies and everything symmetrical.
How would you like to use your garden? For entertaining? Plan on building a patio or deck. For curling up with a good book? How about a nook beside a water feature and a graceful birch tree? You have children and dogs? You'll likely need a lawn, plenty of pathways and maybe a playhouse. Whatever your style don't forget to plant a shady place to sit where you can relax and enjoy the garden you have made.
How will you move around this garden? Your pathways need to match the theme of the garden both in their shape and in the materials you use. The contemporary garden might require straight, stone or concrete paths while a cottage garden style would look better with stepping stones or curving paths made of gravel or bark mulch.
What will be the focal point of your garden? You have to decide where you want people to look, then guide their eyes in that direction. The wall of the toolshed would not be a good direction unless you've draped clematis and wisteria all over it. There are plenty of focal points to chooses between - a water feature, piece of statuary, birdbath, an unusual small tree or a container with outstanding flowers or foliage. Don't get carried away and install too many focal points - you don't want your guests to go cross-eyed.
A small garden will probably be less expensive than a large one because it needs fewer plants and fewer elegant (but often expensive) focal points. It's less work too, because you're not weeding and deadheading by the acre but by the square foot. Also you don't have to spend all your Sunday afternoon cutting the lawn. That's the good news.
The bad news is that you have to more careful that the plants and materials you use complement each other because you don't have much space to separate them. If the stunning red roses scream at the jazzy day lilies you can't move one of them away over the other side, or way down the
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