Landscape design in Perth is a hot topic, our climate can make gardening a real challenge, and it always seems that our neighbours are enjoying greater success. In any less challenging environment, landscaping is a specialised field, but here in Perth, it’s almost an art form, and one can only marvel at how much can be achieved with so little water when you see some of the gardens on display. Anyone can certainly attempt garden landscaping, it’s hard rewarding work, and if you get into trouble, you can always call Luke’s Landscaping for expert help and advice. For those brave enough to give it a go, here are six newbie landscape design tips to improve your chances for success.
1.Identify Your Wants and Needs
This may sound obvious, but you may be surprised at how many people start a garden landscaping project without a clear idea of how they want it to turn out. This quickly leads to discontent and resentment when the outdoor spaces are simply not fit for the desired purpose. This can also be an expensive mistake, a homeowner may change their garden, and this will add more money to the project budget. It’s important to sit down with a piece of paper and make a list of what you want and need in the garden. If you want to grow some vegetables, how much do you want to grow? What types of vegetables? What quantities of veggies do you need? Digging down into a question will present more questions to answer, but this is an essential part of the design process, and it will help you to get your dream garden.
2. Learn Some Landscaping Lingo
Like any industry, the landscaping game has its own lexicon of terms to explain a wide variety of phenomena, techniques, and materials. If you plan on employing an expert landscaper, knowing some of these terms will certainly help you to get your point across at critical junctures. Many gardeners are already familiar with terms, such as flowering, deciduous, perennial, annual, and evergreen, but do you really know what they mean? Luckily, any good web browser will provide a wealth of knowledge on many common and less known gardening terms. Listing them all here is beyond the scope of this particular article, but if you encounter a term you think you understand, check it online first to make sure you’re on the same page as your landscaper.
3. Create a Garden Landscape Scrapbook
It’s a great idea to create a virtual or physical scrapbook that contains images of garden landscapes that you really enjoy. After all, a picture paints a thousand words, and your landscaper will get a better feel for what you want if you have some interesting images to share. A single picture can show a fully formed vision of your garden desires, or it could be a jumping off point for your own creativity. If you mesh together a pair of styles, they can work well together if the garden design is balanced and sympathetic to the space. Even pictures of plants that you like but don’t know the names of will give your landscaper valuable hints on the type of garden that you want.
4. Growing Space is Essential
Many people forget that a garden is a living entity, and over time plants will need space for growing. Planning a garden landscape is exciting, and it’s easy to be lured into filling every available space with planting and other features. But, later on, this will create problems; plants will start to compete with each other as they become crowded in your beds. Plant care is 100% accurate, even if you carefully follow the plant tags, some plants simply grow better than others even if they are the same. So, if you’re planting from seed, make sure you leave plenty of space for the plants to grow properly. Remember, you can always add more plants later if you have obvious gaps that you need to fill. The best gardens can take a few years to establish, some plants don’t make it and others flourish to an astonishing degree. Keep this in mind, and your planting efforts will be far more successful in the medium to long term.
5. Consider the Weather
We have many drier months here in Perth, and it’s important to understand how the weather can affect our gardens. The position of the sun at various times of the year and the prevailing wind patterns all affect how the garden grows throughout the year. As an example: if you want to place a patio on the side of your house, think about the times of the day when it will be most effective at providing shade from the sun. If you want to use the same patio area in the evening, will the wind whip around the home and extinguish the fire pit? These types of questions are important to answer if you use certain parts of your garden at specific times of the day or in the evening. When you sketch out your garden design, revisit it several times a day and make some notes on how the garden changes at certain times.
6. Start Small and Pace Yourself
We touched on this above, but it can take time to establish a garden, and although it’s tempting to realise your garden landscape design quickly, this can lead to failure. Starting smaller in a single area and taking your time will typically yield better results. Every design choice that you make will affect other parts of the garden, so it’s a better strategy to get one area established before moving on to the next. But, if you hire a local professional landscaper, they will have some tried and tested methods to get your garden up and running faster. A great deal of the guesswork associated with a less professional landscaping approach can be eliminated entirely, making faster results possible.
If you need landscape design in Perth, get in touch with Luke’s Landscaping today, and we will be happy to help.
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