Ways to inject some life into your garden design

There is more to a garden than gardening. A well-designed garden will enhance your everyday life and accommodate your everyday outdoor activities and the functions. A well-thought-out garden will also reflect your personality and style.

Taking time to plan and design your garden will add a lot of value to your residential or commercial project. Without a plan, design becomes a gamble.

Spontaneous garden

A garden without design is often nothing but ill-conceived placements of foundation plants and turf, misaligned concrete, and the occasional swing set with a possible fence to, thankfully, hide some portion of it. Well, most of our gardens are like that: spontaneous.

A designed garden, on the other hand, relates hand-in-glove with the house. The garden spaces relate with the interior spaces purposefully and deliberately.

A designed garden succeeds because its planning considers the design as more than a window-dressing exercise. A garden conceived through the design process is more than the sum of its parts.

Well-being   Planning and design makes a difference not only in the efficacy of moving about a garden and using its space, but also in the visual and emotional impact of being in the garden. Research shows that beyond the obvious aesthetic improvements, the opportunity to create visual and physical contact with natural garden elements in our daily lives ultimately improves our mental and physical well-being.

Moreover, installing a garden with no deliberation is eventually more expensive than taking the time to plan and design in advance. If you do not spend the time to understand what plants you need in the way of general care or placement, you reduce the chance that they will thrive. Take the time to evaluate your property, landscape materials, how you move from one place to another, how you will use your property to its best effect will save you a lot of costly mistakes in the long-run.

Personality

Designing and putting together a garden brings a tremendous amount of satisfaction when it is not only full of a gratifying collection of plants but also enriched with your own personal expressions. Your garden is an excellent opportunity to show your unique style. It’s a work of art. Through garden design, we can add meaning to our garden spaces and elements. In the end, when you put your personality into your garden, it becomes a unique space that’s memorable and has long-lasting character.

- The writer is a landscape architect.

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