7 Garden Design Tips

These 7 garden design tips article are ideas that you can easily incorporate into your existing garden to give it a new look for the New Year.

And there are links at the end so you can explore the topics that interest you in more detail.

But to begin with, I have a question:

Is your garden well balanced between practicality and beauty?

If it is, it will please your eyes, provide you with crunchy vegetables, feel responsive beneath your spade, scent your evenings with jasmine and whisper when the wind blows.

And if it isn’t, then I hope that one or more of these tips will help in giving your current garden a few tweaks to make it more ‘you’.

The First Tip

A quick garden design fix for winter interest that you can do straightaway, pretty much regardless of the weather (with some extreme exceptions)

Leaving tall seed heads standing in the winter garden is a trick many of us know about. Birds will enjoy the seeds too. However, after a while the seed heads can look bedraggled.

To get around this, add a group of metal plant support spirals among them in the flower border. These will gradually take over as a focal point and look very effective as a winter garden feature. This works in an ornamental kitchen garden too.

Arty stuff

Painting your unglazed clay plant pots. A pleasing pastime and I’ve written about this elsewhere. Then it was for a ‘children in the garden’ activity, involving foam stickers and more, but this is a more adult version. You can use pots you already have, or go and buy new ones.

Clean the pots thoroughly and allow to dry.
Thin the paint with a small amount of water to make it easier to coat the pot evenly. This also counts as a primer coat.
Applying the paint with a foam brush gives easier and better coverage.
Work around the pot in broad sweeps.
Do not paint the bottom of the pot.
Optionally, extend the paint an inch or so down into the top of the pot, if you’d like the colour rather than the clay to show above the soil level.
When dry apply a second, slightly thicker coat of paint.
If you’re feeling really arty you could add a design – but a plain colour works too.
When that’s dry you can add a sealant to make the paint longer lasting. However, if you omit this, then you can always repaint in the same or a different colour, or even wash it all off.

Tips on what paint to use –

Outdoor paints for masonry and some shed paint will last longer than ‘ordinary’ emulsion. The latter will need sealing if it’s to last when exposed to the elements. However, if, for example, the pots are in a porch they should be fine without.

Using up the small bits of paint left in a can is cost effective. Buying tester pots works too.

Acrylic paint can also be successfully used

Seasonal Scent

The third of our 7 garden design tips involves our noses, which is a critical element of gardening, methinks. And probably a trip to plant nursery or garden centre. (Perhaps you received some garden gift vouchers for Christmas?)

Firstly, depending on the size and layout of garden, decide where you would most appreciate fragrance. For example, next to the back door, or in the front garden border next to the pavement because you walk to the station.

Suggested Shrubs for Scent

Chimonanthus praecox, Wintersweet
Coronilla valentina
Daphne
Hamamelis, Witch hazel
Sarcococca, aka Sweet Box, Christmas box
Viburnum x bodnantense

Now, you may be lucky enough to have a winter flowering fragrant shrub that is small enough to dig up and is currently where you don’t appreciate it. If so, plan to move this after its finished flowering. You could potentially move it now, but as that’s stressful for the plant, it may reduce the flowering. And you need to ensure a good root ball plus prepare a spot in the border for it.

Alternatively, go with the retail option and treat yourself anyway. As the plant you’ll be buying will already be in a pot, you can ‘get away with’ keeping it in a pot until you’re ready to plant it out or plant it in the ground now.

Gardening Teacher Tip

A ‘cheat’ for if you’re planting it now. Dig a pot sized hole and place the plant, still in its pot, in there. Make a note to properly plant it after flowering. This has the advantage of reducing the stress on the plant and protecting the roots from frost damage.

Pots and more Pots

You may have grouped together your outdoor potted plants for winter protection. And they manage to make a design statement just because they are grouped (weird but true).

However, we’re sure to get hard frosts and the roots of those plants will need extra protection. Horticultural fleece and bubble wrap, whilst they do the job, are not overly attractive. So your design tip is to try these options instead to keep the grouping a stylish as well as practical feature –

Use hessian, burlap, cheesecloth as the protective wrapping, tying it on with string. If you do this neatly, it even looks good in formal gardens.
Perhaps you have stainless steel planters and want to keep that look? Then you could use tin foil as insulation instead.
If you already have empty, large pots, drop smaller planted pots inside. Line the gap with fleece, hessian, etc (as it won’t show)

Edible Ornamental Gardens

The fifth of our 7 garden design tips is to add edibles and herbs as part of your ornamental planting scheme. Edible ornamental gardens give you beauty and practicality in one space and are especially useful in smaller gardens. They’re not to be confused with ornamental edible gardens which are designed for fruit and vegetables to look pretty.

Possible plants to include would be –

cordon fruit trees along the fences
an edible flowering cherry rather than a purely ornamental one
edible flowers such as Calendula (marigold)
evergreen herbs work well in both formal and informal garden styles
chives around your roses
even dahlia (edible tubers) and fuchsia (edible berries)

Mixing up the planting can help the biodiversity, encourage more pollinators and predators and mean less work for you.

Garden Boundaries

The first and important thing to remember is that boundaries may be external, ie along the edges of your property but also internal.

And the second thing is to remember that they provide you with a vertical space. These vertical elements may be used –

as support for climbing plants, ornamental and edible
to provide a backdrop for sculpture or a specimen plant
as a decorative feature in their own right
for a specific wildlife habitat

Go and have a look at your boundaries. Are they an eyesore or a positive component in the garden? If the latter, give yourself a pat on the back. If the former, there may not be a quick design fix. However, don’t be dismayed, there are still things you can do! For example, you could add garden trellis at an angle in the border. I’m referring to the sort with spikes that go directly into the soil. (You may have some already). For the purposes of this garden design tip they need to look good together, so should either be the same style or colour. Different heights are not important and can work even better than if they’re all the same. Use odd numbers of these, ie 3 or 5, along the length of the border. Even without any plants growing up them, they’ve added a feature that stops you from focussing on the fence behind!

7 Garden Design Tips – Sitting Down on the Job

After all that thinking we need a rest! I go through the topic of garden seating in more details in the blog below, but a few key points are worth mentioning here to get you started.

The requirements for a purely seating area are not exactly the same as those for a dining area. For example, dining areas often have a BBQ or garden kitchen next to them – would you want to sit next to a BBQ that needs cleaning?
Do you need a fixed seating area? Or would a lightweight chair that you can move around to catch sun or shade better suit your needs?
It may sound obvious, but go and sit on as many different styles of garden seats as you can. If you’re planning on a relaxing corner, you need to be sitting comfortably!

And finally

For when the weather is really bad or it’s evening and too dark to be in the garden, there’s an extra one to add to our 7 garden design tips. Which is to remember that it’s your garden and what suits someone else may not work for you.

What do I mean? For me, the best part about designing gardens is visiting after at least a year and discovering how the clients have continued to make the garden theirs. Of course I design it to suit them in the first place, but a garden is never ‘finished’, plants are always growing, the weather changes things. And seeing their tweaks to my design for them means I’ve succeeded.

For further gardening advice and ideas, check out Plews Potting Shed blogs, including the selection below and our monthly Tipsheet You could come and find us on Instagram @plewsgd Pinterest and Facebook too.

If you’d like help with designing your garden, do get in touch

You could have a peek and follow how I approach my own seriously overgrown new garden – Instagram @spitfiresandslowworms and Facebook – Spitfires and Slow Worms

And if you’d like some personal help, perhaps learning how to design your own garden, we offer a mix of practical sessions and theory in our bespoke Gardening Lessons and Courses. There’s a blog link below plus a pdf download with more info