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Planning your new garden design

- Assessing your garden (2 / 5)

Decking: A Practical Step-by-step Guide

To start off, you will need to assess your current garden, checking for existing elements that you want to keep (and maybe make a feature out of), and also for elements you want to remove.

You will also need to find out details about:

• Your Garden's Aspect - Is your garden north/south/east/west facing?
  - This will affect the type of plants you can grow, and which areas of the garden receive sun and at what times of day.
• Soil Type - Is it heavy, light, dry, wet, acidic, neutral, or alkaline?
  - Again this affects the type of plants you can grow, and what soil modifications you may need.
• Plant Exposure - Is it exposed to wind, frost, or sheltered?
  - This can affect the type of plants you can grow, and how well your plants do. It also affects your comfort in the garden!
• Soil Drainage - Do you have areas of standing water, or is it dry?
  - Unless you want a bog garden, you may need to condition the soil to help excess water drain away.
• Topography - Is your garden level or sloping, and to what extent?
  - If it slopes, are you happy with it? Do you want to terrace the garden, or level it off?

At this stage, you should also note down how good access into and out of your garden is. Take measurements of any access routes into your garden. This will be important once work starts as poor access will certainly slow things down!

Once you have done this 'survey' of your garden, you should have a better idea of what is possible to achieve given the physical aspects of it. It should also give you a starting point to consider the next step...

Introduction

Garden functions