© Steve Gunther / The Taunton Press
Transforming your yard from a winter wasteland into a stunning summer garden can feel like an insurmountable task. That's where a garden plan can help.
A garden plan is a scale drawing of your property from a bird's-eye perspective. Landscapers use garden plans to try out ideas and then achieve a design whose look and feel fits with the house and flows evenly across the entire property.
Landscaping that suits a home, fits tastefully into its surroundings and goes above and beyond the neighborhood’s standard can add as much as 12.7% to a property's value, according to several studies conducted over the years. A sophisticated design and big, mature plants are the biggest factors in increasing home value and selling prices, researchers found. (Read more in this report [in .PDF format] by the Virginia Cooperative Extension service.)
"It makes the house stand out and look like it's cared for and loved," says Jim Lapides, spokesman for the American Society of Landscape Architects.
At the minimum, in a stalled real-estate market, attractive landscaping helps move a sale, adding curb appeal to get buyers out of their cars and off their computers to look inside.
Slide show: Taking garden ideas from sketches to soil
No art degree required
Winter and early spring are perfect seasons for planning, since weather often prevents you from working in the garden.
You can make a simple garden plan even if you flunked art in high school. It involves measuring your property, transferring the measurements to graph paper and connecting the squares to sketch out your design. You'll use tracing paper to experiment with design ideas and come up with a final design.
Your design likely won't achieve expert precision, however. Pros have training and tools to reach a level of exactness that's beyond the reach of most weekend gardeners. "A lot of people will go out and measure the four sides of the property, then find that things don't match up, because nothing is perfectly square," says garden coach and landscape designer Robin Haglund of Garden Mentors, in Seattle.
What you can create is a useful approximation of your landscape to guide you in:
- Placing beds and paths;
- Designing a landscape whose parts work nicely together;
- Calculating how much soil, gravel, stone, plant material, mulch and other supplies you'll need so you don't order too much or, conversely, come up short and pay extra for another delivery;
- Deciding which plants go where, to avoid expensive splurges at nurseries.
Before you get going
There are a couple of things to consider before launching full speed into your garden plan:
1. Know where your property lines are. Don't assume an existing fence or wall is an accurate guide. "A fence could have been placed on a property line 50 years ago completely wrong," Haglund says. Making a garden bed that slops over the boundary between your place and your neighbor's may not matter much, as it can be easily moved. But if you're constructing a fence, patio, concrete walkway or garden shed, you'll need to be careful. "I often recommend clients invest in a legal survey," Haglund adds, "particularly if they are getting into big construction and they don't know where their property lines are." (Locate a certified survey technician near you by contacting your state affiliate of the National Society of Professional Surveyors with this locator map.)
2. Your city or county planning office may require a permit for building structures such as fences, gazebos, ponds or other garden structures. Policies and enforcement zeal vary, but inspectors have been known to make tearful homeowners rip up work done without a permit.
Once you've obtained any permission or surveys required, then you're ready to get going. Here are the supplies you'll need:
- 50-foot tape measure (in hardware stores or online for between $10 and $20) or mark 1-foot increments on a 50-foot piece of rope or string.
- Scratch paper and pencil.
- Tracing paper (or tissue paper) and quarter-inch graph paper: Find inexpensive tablets at drug and stationery stores. You also can buy large rolls of graph paper in increments from a quarter-inch to 1-inch squares for about $20 for a 100-foot roll at drafting or architectural supply firms or educational supply companies.
- Architect's rule (optional): Used to transfer measurements to a scale drawing and found at a drafting or architectural supply house. They cost around $80 to $100. This tool allows you to skip the graph paper and translate the measurements from your property onto plain paper. eHow provides instructions on using an architect's rule.
Get out your measuring tape
Give yourself several hours to measure your land. Although it's not crucial, it helps to enlist someone to assist you.
1. Measure and record your lot lines. Start at a corner. Get your helper to stand still at the corner, holding one end of the measuring tape. Or, if you're working alone, tie the tape or string to a heavy rock or a stake in the ground. Record your measurements on scratch paper. (City and suburban lots typically are laid out in round numbers — 50 feet by 50 feet, or 50 feet by 100 feet, for example.) If you've already got a survey of the property, consult it to help define dimensions, corners and boundaries.
2. Record the building dimensions.Measure outside lines of the house and any sheds, garage, carport, driveway, patio, deck and other permanent structures. Don't forget trees, ponds, a birdbath, garden beds or paths that you'll need to plan around.
3. Note other details.Write down which beds get full sun, which get partial sun and which are in shade; which are protected from wind; and where the wind hits hardest. These observations help in planning your garden. Landscape designer Julie Moir Messervy, based in Saxtons River, Vt., suggests also learning and noting what you can about the history of your patch of earth. Do this by talking with neighbors and checking tax records (at the assessor's office), deed history (court records) and building permit records (planning department) for your address. Knowing its history helps give your garden continuity. Finding out, for example, that your old lilac was planted by the home's builder in the 1880s may inspire you to work it into your design instead of uprooting it.
