Moving into a new home is one the most wonderful moments of a person’s life. Much like an empty house painted stark white, a sparsely landscaped yard can be exciting because there are plenty of opportunities for expressing one’s tastes and preferences.
Normally a new homebuyer will furnish and decorate the inside of the home immediately and the landscape is left for another day. Months and years pass and the little tree the builder planted at the end of the driveway has grown a bit but the yard still looks barren. Some folks will decide to hire a landscape professional to design and install a landscape but others will want to do it themselves.
The Mills River Pollinator Garden was designed on a single sheet of paper using a pen.
Landscape designs can be simple line drawings. The author sketched the design above for the Mills River Pollinator Garden after tracing a satellite image of the site onto paper.
Begin by using a digital camera to take pictures of the existing landscape. Stand at each of the four corners of the property looking back at the house and capture those images. Do the same on all four side of the house looking out. Stand in each outside doorway and in the most critical windows photographing the views. It may be helpful to have someone stand somewhere in each picture so that you can get sense of scale later. This can also be done using free mapping sites online.
Tracing a picture of the property on a window gives you an accurate sketch of the site that can be used for drawing a landscape design.
Tracing a picture of the property on a window gives you an accurate sketch of the site that can be used for drawing a landscape design.
Using any basic digital imaging program, print as large as possible several copies of each image. The printed pictures will be used to try out new ideas. Sketch walkways, paths, walls, hedges, water features, flowerbeds, shrubs and trees. Try sketching them in various shapes and heights. Peruse garden design books looking for plants and landscape features that you like and try them out on your digital templates.
Once you decide on the features you might like to try, obtain a copy of the plat of your property or simply download a free satellite image of your property. Using tracing paper, copy the outlines of the house and the property lines. This will be your final design template.
Landscape design tools are handy for creating icons of plants and keeping thing in proper scale.
Landscape designs can be drawn by amateurs. This was made by tracing the outlines of the home from a printed picture as seen in the images above.
Now that you have your ideas and a template of the property you can start sketching the final design. Purchase a landscape design ruler at any art supply store. This ruler has templates of trees, shrubs, and garden features so that you can sketch these landscape features quickly and neatly.
If you are artistic and want a colorful design template that can be framed and displayed, use colored pencils or watercolors to color the design. Stencil a title on the design such as ‘Johnson Residence’ in large font and include your name somewhere on the design in small font. Now you have the tools to get started creating your own landscape design.
Natural landscapes utilizing native plants leave behind a positive environmental legacy in the landscape. Native trees and shrubs can live for decades or even centuries. The natural landscapes we plant today become the woodlands and parks of the future. An oak may take 25 years before it starts casting any real shade but it can go on cooling our environment, stabilizing soil, and capturing pollutants long after we are all gone. Native plants also provide food and shelter for wildlife including pollinating insects.
A landscape design can be drawn on a printed picture of a home.
If you do not want to design your own landscape you can hire a professional landscape architect to render a landscape design plan.
