The first couple of months had really about taking the garden by the scruff of its neck and starting to tidy things up. By this point, I'd been making notes and thinking about things for the best part of two years and by this point I had a whole bunch of completely impractical ideas and a garden that was nowhere near that at all.
Obviously, I needed to have some way to turn those ideas into something that could be practically done, and something that I could actually start working on. In the back of my mind, I also had the idea that I didn't want to do anything in terms of ripping things out of the garden or even doing any more than generally tidying up the flower beds until we'd had enough time to see what the garden did. At the very least, I figured a year to watch the garden change and work out what was in there wouldn't be a bad idea before I started ripping stuff out.
Well, maybe not everything needed to wait an entire year.
I knew we wanted to attract wildlife and nature into the garden - that was one of our key requirements for the garden. I also knew that we wanted to have somewhere to sit and eat and entertain, and that the lawn was something that I wanted to minimise as much as possible. I mean, it's a green desert - no practical use for wildlife, and takes a lot of water and a lot of effort to mow and trim and edge. Plus when you have hay fever, being stuck behind a machine that's basically spitting the things that make your eyes hurt into your eyes isn't a fun way to spend an afternoon.
That gave me a few things that I could work on without having to disturb the bulk of the garden:
- Dig a wildlife pond
- Build some bug houses
- Somewhere to put a table and chairs
- Take out plants that did nothing for wildlife
- Treat any issues found in the garden
- Weeding and general maintenance
The last one was the boring one, and I still didn't know what was a weed and what was a plant and I was still identifying what was in the garden, so I had to be careful and cautious. That's what I told my wife, anyway. Really, I just wanted an excuse to do something that was going to have a big impact. Before I could, though, I really needed to think things through.
I'm a pretty scientifically-minded person in that I like a process, and I like to think things through up front. When I'm doing anything from decorating a room or planning a kitchen, I like to come up with a top-down plan of what I'm going. They also do this in all of the TV shows, too, so I decided to give that a go. When I was doing internal room plans for the house, I tended to use Sweet Home 3D a lot to do the planning - draw out the room, add the doors and windows, and then move the furniture around virtually to save the physical effort until the layout works and then do it for real. That's worked well for years, so I figured I'd do the same with the garden.
Sweet Home 3D wasn't for gardens, though, so I spent a bit of time hunting around similar options for gardens. After trying and failing, I decided the best thing to do was to go old-school and go with pen and paper. The downside is that every time you want to try something new, you've got to redraw and start from scratch all over again. I had the feeling it'd take me several goes, so I came up with another option:
A see-through whiteboard from Ikea
I had a roll of paper that I could put behind it and you could clearly see that through the glass. Then all I had to do was trace the outline and I had something to scribble on in double-quick time. So, I measured the garden and put together a top-down view to fit the whiteboard, gathered together a collection of pens, and started drawing out some ideas and sketch out the favourites onto something more permanent. It worked a treat - coloured whiteboard pens meant it was easy to colourise, and it was simple to rub something out and move it around. It didn't take too long to come up with the vague shape of a plan:
A very rough sketch from the notebook
I do need to be completely honest, though: this is the only copy of a plan that I appear to have kept, ever, and it's not actually from the time that I'm writing about. I worked almost entirely off the whiteboard, and would erase and update as I went and eventually wiped it clean when I didn't need it any more. This is actually taken from some tweaks I was making to the design earlier this year. However, it still shows the basics of what was intended: split the garden into four quarters, with one at the back for the pond next to the trampoline and slide, and the front would then be a seating area near to the house (for ease of getting food and drink there) and a lawn area for the kids to run around and fall over. My youngest still does gymnastics, so the falling over area was particularly important to have. Again, to be completely honest, I actually had the seating bit on the other side of the garden originally until it was pointed out to me by my Dad that it would be in shade in the afternoon and early evening. Rookie error, that one, but thankfully the only difference it made was that I flipped those sides over.
The rough idea behind this plan was that the trampoline wasn't really a pretty thing to look at, so putting it toward the back would allow it to be screened off and if I was clever about the screening I could put in a pergola structure which would also be a home for my daughter's gymnastics bar. Having the seating area next to the screen would mean that it'd be pretty much invisible when the garden was being used and would server multiple purposes. Shifting it to the opposite side meant that plan went out the window to some extent, but I could still make it work. I was also thinking longer term, in that I knew the trampoline wouldn't be there forever and that at some point the gymnastics bar would be out of favour. If I had an area that was basically going to become available later, it opened up the possibilities for changing the use at a later date - veg beds, or a fire pit, or something like that.
Flipping the seating area over to the other side meant I could leave one entire half of the garden alone, too - something not to be sniffed at. I could start by putting in the pond and the seating area, and neither of those things would impact any other part of the garden. Better still, it meant I got rid of half of the lawn in one fell swoop. The other side of the garden wasn't quite so set in stone and I still wanted to give myself some room to think things through a little more on that side, so being able to leave that until later on was a useful thing.
This left me in the position that I now had my next project: create a pond. I'd watched Charlie Dimmock do this a hundred times - how difficult could it be?
Published
Last Post: Where do we begin?
Next Post: The Penis Pond
How about sharing this article on your favorite social media network if you've found it interesting? For feedback, please get in touch via Twitter or Instagram