Have you ever seen a garden that just looked wrong, or the sense of the area didn’t feel right? Most often, something about the setup and layout seems awry, too closed in or very square and unattractive. It’s possible that the garden was simply too cluttered. People start creating a garden area and want to add fences, fountains, garden statues, eye-catchers and any number of things to make their garden look nice. Sadly, in doing so, they forget the number one rule of garden layout: The more natural a garden, the better.
This is why it is important to set your garden up for success and let the plants guide the person through the beautiful world of your bit of nature. The way to do this is to have a plan for your garden before it ever gets started. It’s important to sit down with a piece of paper and outline how you want your garden to be laid out before you actually get to planting. Too often, people just want to go get 10 or 15 plants they like or find attractive and get to work planting them. This is a lazy thing to do if you are a gardener. If you were building a house, would you just go out and buy lumber, nails, and a saw and start building away? Of course you wouldn’t, so you shouldn’t do the same with a garden. Just like building a house, a solid foundation is the most important thing to get started. Figure out what kind of area and space you have to work with. You can leave room for expansion later, but for now, it is important to have solid boundaries.
After that, it is important to plan which plants you want where in the garden and how you want them to work together to make your garden the best it can possibly be. You need to carry out some important research about which plants compliment each other and which plants need to be solitary. Then comes the most important part of the planning process: You must set your garden up to become its own structure. If you need a wall to separate the walkway from the garden, you must first use an artificial structure like a picket fence, but it’s important to grow bushes that are firm and can be trimmed into walls later when they full grown. Also, many of the structures available are tools to define which way your plants grow. For example, a wire walkway is simple but provides a base for ivy to attach to and makes an almost all natural walkway for people to pass through.