Gardening

Your garden is something which will grow with you for the period that you are living in it. It is therefore vital that you have a good design for it.

Always try to identify the different areas that you would like to be in, such as lawned areas, flower beds and utility areas. Once you have decided on these, you can put this onto plan.

From your local municipality, get the plans for your home and transfer this, to scale if you can, onto gridded paper.

First draw in the pathways that you wish to have and then place the larger features, such as water features and other hard landscaping items such as statuary.

Once this is done, place your flower beds. On the boundaries, don't make your beds narrower than 1.5m, especially if you are going to be planting trees and shrubs in them.

A plan for your garden is essential. It will allow you to have a well designed and functional garden for years to come.

Once you have your garden laid out, you should define your lawn.

Placing a permanent mowing edge onto your flower beds will keep the lawn from growing into the beds and the beds from growing into the lawn.

There are many companies out there who will come and lay an extruded, continuous, concrete edge in your garden such as KwikKerb. As nice as these may initially look, they have a very large profile and can look very bulky in a small garden especially.

I prefer to get cobbles from my local garden centre and use these in my designs. Get some bags of Ready Mix concrete from your builders supplier and embed the cobbles into this. One bag of concrete should do 7 square metres of 100x100mm cobbles.

In South Africa, more and more people are buying homes on smaller properties.

Here are some ways to create the illusion of space:

-Before planting your garden, paint the boundary walls in the darkest green you can get. This will make the garden look deeper once the foliage has grown in front of the walls.
-Plant smaller leaves in the background of your flower beds and slightly larger ones in the foreground.
-Use mirrors in your garden to create the effect that there is another garden beyond the boundary wall.
-You could create a paint effect if you are brave which could show a 3D paint effect: Tromp d' Loeil.

This is probably the most difficult thing about gardening and implementing your design. Each species of plant requires different conditions and the success of your garden depends on getting the placement of your plants right.

There are several things that you need to keep in mind when placing plants, some of these are listed below:

-Soil type
There are three different soil types that any garden can have namely, sand, clay and loam.
Loam is the most balanced soil type. It contains a good mixture of sand, clay and compost. Some plants such as cacti, however, prefer a well drained, sandy soil while roses prefer soil with a good dose of clay.

-Sun/shade conditions
Read the labels carefully when buying plants. Most garden centres label their plants well as far as light conditions are concerned. We are dealing in this lens with garden plans so I will focus on these light conditions.
Full sun. As this label reads, these are plants which will grow on the northern side of the home which may receive full sun almost all day.
Semi-shade. These are plants which will grow either on the west or east side of your home. Western sun, however, can be quite harsh, so please choose plants wisely for this position.
Shade. These are plans which grow predominantly in the full shade. This is often a difficult area to garden in and often creative thought should be placed into gardening in this area.

-Water conditions
There are several different water zones in a garden. In most cases, your higher water zones are situated closer to the home. The further you get away from the house, the drier the zone tends to get.
There are even plants which will grow in bog like or water logged conditions with their roots constantly wet.
Plants in very dry conditions can even be watered once a month in order to thrive!

The best thing to do is to design your garden and decide on a theme for the different areas of the garden are going to be and then plan your plantings accordingly. The internet is a vast source of information. Use it to research your plants to avoid planting things in the wrong places.

I mentioned the concept of rooms in my previous post, and I think I need to expand on this a little.

If you want a really interesting garden, it's not a good idea to be able to stand in the one corner of the property and view the entire garden. What creates an air of mystery is of you create rooms in your garden which are screened from the others. This way, you can create separate garden in your space with different themes. You could have a minimalist garden outside your bedroom, a country styled garden at the entrance and a potager garden at the back door with fresh herbs and vegetables.

Now you can take this a bit further by "luring" your visitors into these rooms by using ornamentation or feature plants to attract the eye, and thus the viewer, into that space. Some ways of achieving this is by using focal features such as statuary, water features and sculptural plants.

Whether it is a torrential roar or a steady trickle, water in the garden has an amazingly soothing effect.

There are various types of water features which can be used in your garden, many of which are inexpensive and can be constructed by yourself in an afternoon. The most simple type is the rim flow pot which is basically a container which has water flowing over the rim.This is captured by a receptacle at the base and then re-circulated by means of a pump.

If you live on a busy road or you have noise created by unnatural factors, a water feature can dampen the effect of this sound

Watering your garden can be the most time consuming thing you could do if you are going to do it manually. Not only that, but a lot of water wastage takes place when you forget the sprinkler on overnight!

Installing an automated irrigation system is the way to go. By doing this you could zone your garden and plant things with different water requirements in these zones. By having an automated system, you also alleviate the problems with forgetting the water on occasionally.

Drip irrigation is also a trend which is taking off in South Africa. This system uses a network of pipes which lie on the surface of the soil or just below. The plants soon cover the pipes as they grow.
Drip irrigation delivers the water directly to the soil and there is no change of the water being blown over the garden fence!