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Coming Up With Good Garden Design Ideas

Naturalistic planting design
Image via Wikipedia

Almost everyone who has a garden would like it to be at least neat and tidy and at best well designed and peaceful. But getting garden design ideas can be daunting for many gardeners.

But good ideas are all around. Other gardens in the neighbourhood are a good place to start. Garden design books at the library can be very helpful and the internet will provide any number of garden design images and layouts for you to gain inspiration from.

But there are still many challenges for the budding garden designer. A common problem is to create a garden with plants straight from the nursery and overlook the fact that most of the plants will be young immature plants.

What started out as a charming garden of plants, pebbles and bits turns into an overgrown, overcrowded mess with the resultant disappointment.

Another alternative is to call in a garden designer or landscaper to help with the ideas. But they can get pretty expensive and often are not really suitable for the smaller design jobs in most gardens.

What can be really helpful and convenient is to work together with your garden maintenance contractor. If they are keen gardeners themselves they will be able to offer good advice – will probably be able to get you plants at a discount and will be less expensive than a landscaper to work with. They will probably also have some good ideas because they work in a lot of different gardens getting locally usable ideas that they will share.

 

 

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Functions of a Garden Designer

A Garden Designer is a professional or amateur who designs the plan and features of gardens. While professional designers are more experienced and work for various clients for set fees, amateurs design their own gardens or those of friends and relatives just as a hobby.

Garden designs and landscape design work hand in hand. They deal with topography, water and drainage, planting, aesthetics, building and construction, site characteristics, climate and genius loci. Garden designers are trained to incorporate aesthetic arts and technical arts in the design of projects.

The twentieth century has seen garden design courses change emphasis from horticulture to focus more on the design aspects. The traditional apprentice system in which designers used to learn the trade slowly gave way to specialist college-level landscape planning and design courses. Today, ornamental horticulture and landscape architecture departments of various universities continue to churn out modern garden designers.

 By virtue of historical periods and professional discipline, there has been an evolution of design methods for constructing gardens. From renaissance gardens that were drawn by pen and paper to contemporary ones that are drawn solely with computer software, the process of the design has always influenced the end product.

There have been attempts to distinguish between landscape design and Garden Design. A typical Garden Designer will build around plant palettes while Landscape designers build around space considerations and place-making to create architectural spaces and circulation routes with plants and other elements. An appreciation of this can be seen in gardens that have interesting plants but were not planned as a whole and integrated composition; and well planned gardens – in terms of overall designs, that lack interesting planting details.

Some designers have a wide knowledge with plants but lack conceptual designs, other very exposed landscape architects and designers lack horticultural and botanical know-how. Any good Garden Designer must be able to do both – create beautiful and interesting gardens on sustainable landscapes.

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