There’s nothing quite as lovely as relaxing in a beautifully designed, fit-for-purpose outdoor space, whether it’s something sleek and contemporary focusing on a variety of greenery or a bloom-filled space with traditional good looks at its heart. If you’re exploring the exciting subject of garden design for beginners, this article is for you. We’re going to reveal a host of cool and useful garden design tips for beginners, aimed to inspire. Read on to find out the steps you’ll need to take to design a garden, understand the space, and know the best tools for garden design. Welcome to our guide to simple garden design for beginners.
Steps to Design a Garden
So far all you’ve got is an empty outdoor space, with or without a lawn. Maybe you have a part-designed garden and you want to bring all the elements together in a creative way that works both visually and practically. Maybe you want to redesign an existing garden. Whatever your goal, it can be hard to know where to start. While embarking on a garden design project can be daunting, SketchUp makes the whole process fun and easy. So first in our garden design tips for beginners article, here’s an idea about the things you’ll need to think about along the way. For the purposes of this article let’s imagine you’ve been asked to design a garden for a client. But the steps are the same whatever your starting point, whatever the project, even if it’s you designing your own garden.
Step one is the initial consultation and brainstorming phase. If there’s no client you won’t need to figure out what they want, so you can dive right into the exciting brainstorming bit. What are the priorities you need to think about? Do you want it to be an entertainment space, or a place where gardening itself is the focus? Will children be using the space, and if so what age are they? Should it take safety into account for elderly people or does it need to be pet friendly, avoiding poisonous plants that can harm cats and dogs?
Step two in our guide to simple garden design for beginners is all about getting to know the site in intimate detail. A detailed site survey will involve essentials like taking accurate measurements of the space. Bear in mind it’s always best to measure at least twice to make sure you’ve got it right. You’ll also need to pin down peculiarities like drain covers and access to water and sewage pipes. You might need to think about electricity cables or the buried equipment feeding into a ground source heat pump. If the land slopes it matters because you need to consider drainage to avoid potential flooding and stop large amounts of water gathering. Then there are existing features like patios, sheds, ponds, trees and other planting. It’s important to know that these days, every tree is precious.
Step three involves creating your design concepts and mood board. Now you understand the scope of the space and you’ve decided on the client’s – or your own – requirements, you can get down to putting together an exciting collection of images, colours, materials and surfaces to play with, which represent what you’re considering for the final design. You might choose the elements based on their colour, the materials they’re made from, the fact that they flower or fruit at different times of the year, the maintenance, the weather, and all the things that will either restrict or direct the design.
Step four in our tips on garden design for beginners, you’ll draft a concept plan – and this is where SketchUp is extremely useful. It’s really easy and fast to draft garden design ideas in SketchUp, and the representations you make will look wonderfully realistic. Assuming you’ve got the measuring bit right from the start, your ideas and inspiration should flow. Aim to nail down all of your key planting, garden furniture layout, and every other key garden design aspect you’ve specified.
Step five is the stage at which you transform your ideas into full garden design plans, all based on your original ideas in SketchUp. It’s a simple matter to draft a complete garden design. You should include details of all the hard landscaping – whether it’s walls or sunken areas, hills and hillocks or flat areas for dining and entertaining, wildlife areas and water features. Plus the planting and any existing features you’re planning to keep and work around.
Step six is the build itself, the garden design implementation. Because you’ve taken such care and put so much thought into each step, this part should go pretty smoothly. You might, of course, discover unexpected features either buried or hidden in some other way, but SketchUp makes it really easy to amend designs as well, so all is not lost.
Understanding Your Space
A garden site survey can make all the difference at this stage in the garden design beginner’s process, simply because it’s so rare to find an outdoor space that’s completely flat and a perfectly regular shape. These details need to be carefully surveyed and accurate measurements taken. You’ll have to get to grips with the entire space, measuring it with great care to support your design. This means identifying, locating and measuring every element of the space that can’t be moved or changed, for example existing paths, steps, patio, garden entrances, drain covers, gutters, and more.
It’s also sensible to make a note of all the different materials used within the garden, including grassed areas and block paving, concrete and paving stones, gravelled areas, borders and the rest. This level of intimacy, also covering the types, locations and sizes of trees and shrubs, is well worth noting. In garden design this deep level of knowledge and familiarity can make your eventual build so much easier and faster, with fewer hiccups and less potential for delay.
Best Tools for Garden Design
There’s a lot to be said for designing a garden the traditional way, with pen and paper, and it’s still useful. Drawing by hand is also a pleasure for many. Plenty of garden designers genuinely enjoy the process of sketching by hand, at least when they’re getting their basic early ideas together. On the other hand SketchUp is a far more powerful and flexible design tool, as well as being faster and great fun. Once you’ve got to grips with the tool your garden design ideas can flow as fast as your thought processes, which makes designing even more of a pleasure.
SketchUp is ideal for quickly capturing creative garden design ideas. It’s also ideal for trying out ideas in a way that provides a realistic 3D view of what the finished garden will look like, without having to do any real-life landscaping or garden modification. This means simple garden design for beginners can easily involve test driving radical ideas without having to actually do anything radical on the ground. You’ll feel free to take your designs to the max and beyond with confidence.
The benefits of SketchUp are the same whether you’re creating a brand new garden design from a blank space or a garden redesign where you’ll be keeping some of the legacy features, either making the most of them or disguising them by rolling them cleverly into your design. And the 3D design capabilities of SketchUp are genuinely awe-inspiring. You can realise your proposed garden design virtually and evaluate it, along with your client if there is one, using 3D walkthroughs that look startlingly realistic.
It’s fast and easy to make design tweaks and changes are easily achieved in SketchUp too, and every step of the process is easy and intuitive. As a garden design beginner you’ll love the way it supports learning as well as creating a professional looking garden design easily, having had fun doing it. A huge collection of tutorials and learning resources supports you all the way.
Because SketchUp garden designs can be readily shared for comment and collaboration it saves time and hassle making decisions. And the programme’s superb augmented reality and VR capabilities really bring gardens to life for yourself and the people you design for.
Last but not least, SketchUp generates the design documentation you need for a professional job via Layout. There’s a free version to play with, offering lots of exciting functionality, but once you’ve got to grips with it you’ll probably want to move to the brilliant all-singing, all-dancing SketchUp Pro, widely used and loved by professional garden and landscape designers across the globe.
We hope you’ve enjoyed our guide to garden design for beginners. We’d like to wish you years of happy garden design!
