How to design a new garden
One of the biggest challenges facing anyone building a new home or undertaking a large-scale renovation actually lies outside. After wrangling with endless internal design considerations it’s easy to let fatigue tempt you into forgetting that a home’s garden is crucial to its visual impact and can add serious financial value.
Gardens serve a number of functions: they set the visual tone of your home; they are quite literally the first insight visitors have into your world; they have practical uses like car parking; they provide us with a place to relax and entertain visitors; and may even feature vegetable gardens to feed us. To serve these functions well, a garden needs to offer one or more well-defined areas within its boundaries, while relating to the house itself. By following a few simple design rules, expensive mistakes can be avoided and a new garden created that meets both practical and aspirational design needs.
WHERE TO START
As a general rule there are two routes you can follow to design a garden: you can employ a designer or go it alone, managing a contractor or subbies to implement your own design. Both routes have their pros and cons, so be clear from the outset what you want to
