Ten Garden Design Tips
I’ve been designing gardens for over a decade now; here are a few very simple tips I’ve picked up along the way that make for great gardens…
Prioritise the main views around the property and focus your energies on these areas; you will lose interest in maintaining areas that you rarely spend time in
A hedge is usually lower maintenance than maintaining a mixed border of different ‘low-maintenance’ plants
Beth Chatto’s adage ‘right plant, right place’ is a fantastic general guide to plant selection. Choose a plant with appropriate light, soil, water and climactic requirement for the spot you have in mind. Over the life of a garden this can save hundreds of hours of unnecessary work.
A well-maintained small garden is much more enjoyable and sustainable than a large garden which you are not able to adequately care for
Keep built elements in a garden to a minimum but use thoughtfully-selected, beautiful materials to create features that are an asset to your property
Figure out what elements in your property you wish to hide or accentuate, and how you would like to spend time in the garden and move through it. Design your garden around these practical considerations
As well as these practical considerations, a garden should be appealing and ideally ‘tell a story’… part of the practical value a garden offers is to look great and to be an enjoyable place to spend time in. Select plants that look good together with an eye to visual principles such as contrast, repetition, colour etc
Humans, like animals and insects enjoy being in gardens that offer both sunny and shady spots, different layers of plants and water
Group plants together with similar water requirements together
Sometimes it’s worth paying the extra money to get a nicer-looking shed that looks like an appealing garden feature, rather than something that you have to hide. Or paint a terrible-looking exisiting one charcoal-grey or a dull green to make it disappear
Happy gardening,
Landscape Designer Kaz Krasovskis
Insta: @kazkrasovskis
www.kazkrasovskis.com.au