Landscaping On Paper

By Kent Higgins

When doing the actual drafting of your garden design, you can draw many different kinds of plans. If you are drawing them for your own use, perhaps only the crudest of plans will be required since you know what the final picture will be like. On the other hand, people who can develop an artistic skill at drawing landscape plans often get a great deal of pleasure out of a finished garden plan. Many home gardeners like to work from planting plans or rough working plans, but still go on and make their final landscape plan quite a work of art so that they can frame it and hang it in their workshop or den.

Garden Structures

Working drawings and specifications for pergolas, tool sheds, and other garden structures constitute another type of work that you might want to try. They must be drawn to an exact scale so you can transfer the information from plan to the actual ground by a simple enlarging process.

Planting Plan and List

The first result of your efforts at drawing will be a planting plan, a simple piece of work wherein individual plants are shown as plain circles drawn with a compass. Along with this should go a planting list which enumerates the plants to be used by both their botanical and their common names, states the quantity of each kind required, and, many times, gives the size of the plants at planting time.

Take pains to be extremely accurate in locating the center of each plant on the working plan so you will be able to find the exact spot for it on the property like growing bougainvillea on a trellis. Otherwise you might end up with too few plants for a certain situation and a too thin planting, or, worse yet, too many plants and undesirable crowding.

Garden structures often take up too much space in the average small garden. However, if you have a good basic knowledge of carpentry you should be able to design and construct them yourself. A competent professional carpenter should, of course, be able to translate your rough drawings into a finished tool shed or pergola that meets with your approval.

As an example of the importance of this sort of planning you need only look at some of the barbecues, fireplaces and summer kitchens found on home properties. Such a feature should never be built unless it is worthy of the prominent part it plays in the overall plan. Certainly, one built according to detailed specifications drawn up by a professional architect (plans for which can often be bought very reasonably') is vastly preferable to the all too common result of amateur efforts in piling up a lot of rocks and holding them in place with mortar. - 29857

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