Salty Sam’s Fun Blog for Children
Number 586
Designing a Garden
Hello Everyone
Last week, l was telling you about Capability Brown.
He was a famous garden designer of his day – and he usually worked in very large spaces.
People who have gardens as big as some of the ones he designed nowadays have to be very rich – actually they were rich then too.
A lot of gardens nowadays are of a more modest size, and as new houses are built, their gardens tend to be smaller than ever.
There is no reason why you can’t design your own garden from scratch if you move into one of these new houses.
lf you move into a house that has an established garden – the rule is to wait for a year before you start changing too much, because you don’t know what treasures my be hiding under the soil that you don’t want to disturb.
Designing a garden can be a project that the whole family can be involved in.
Everyone can have an opinion about how they would like to use the garden, and what they would like to see in it.
lt is not that hard to design a garden. You just need to follow a few basic rules to ensure success.
The first thing to do is measure the space you want to make into a garden.
Put your plan on paper.
What is in your garden that you want to keep?
What do you need to add like a shed for putting tools and toys in?
Do you want a bird table outside the window?
Do you need a flat place for a table and chairs?
Which places outside are in your sight lines. ln other words what can you see from your windows – and maybe a door.
Plan your garden before building it.
Paths don’t have to be straight and lawns can be any shape. lf you have a lawn, will you be able to get a mower to it from where the mower will be kept?
You can use recycled materials to make paths and build walls to save money. A path could just be a few stepping stones.
Which direction is your garden facing in? How much sun do you get in it in the winter and in the summer? lf it is a small, north facing garden for example, you will probably get next to no sun in it through the winter months and so it could remain very wet. You can build a lawn like this on a honeycomb mesh to keep the ground stable enough for even a wheelchair to run across it.
You need to test to see what kind of soil you have. There is no point in planting azaleas, rhododendrons, pieris or camellias in chalky soil. But you can grow these plants in pots because you can choose the soil you have in them.
And if you have very poor soil, you can work to improve it or create raised beds, and put compost of your choice in them.
lf you have heavy shade, choose woodland flowers, also ferns and hostas, if you have blazing sun, silver foliage plants usually do well in those conditions, and bog plants do well where it is very wet.
lf you have a place where frost collects in the winter (called a frost pocket), don’t put tender plants there.
Lots of plants can go outside in the summer, but will have to be brought inside in the winter – like citrus trees. Do you have room for them inside? They will not like being in the house much, you will need a greenhouse.
lf you live in the centre of a large town that is not too far north like London for example, you can grow tropical plants in your garden if it is sheltered by walls.
To get a full range of plants that do well in the conditions in your garden, look in a book or look online.
Right plant, right place will improve your chances of success!
lf you plant a tree, check what its final size will be, and don’t plant any right next to the house.
Some trees aren’t really suitable for small gardens at all: weeping willows have long roots and mulberry fruits stain clothing badly.
lf your garden is very small, you can add room to it by going vertical!
Grow clematis up each side of a swing frame, put herbs on shelves up the side of a fence, put window boxes on your house, use strawberry towers; grow a rose up the trunk of a tree.
Do you need a shed for your tools and a greenhouse for your plants or will an outside cupboard do?
You can employ a small robot lawnmower to mow the lawn for you and this will save you time. lt can mow the lawn while you are on holiday, at work or at school. lt can be so quiet that it can run at night. lt will put the clippings back in the lawn to mulch it.
Watering systems can be controlled by an app on a phone.
Once the structure of the garden is designed, it can be marked out on the ground by dribbling sand out of a plastic bottle.
Stand back and see if the proportions are pleasing to look at.
Then you can put paths, lawns and beds in place.
lf you buy plants in pots to put in your garden, position them around the place you want to put them, stand back and see if they look alright before you plant them.
You can buy lots of evergreen plants beside fir trees to keep your garden colourful in winter. Grasses can be low maintenance plants and can give structure to the garden too.
To fill a garden quickly and cheaply with colourful flowers sow lots of annuals from seed. This is a job that children can easily do.
What style of garden do you want?
Do you want a courtyard garden, an orchard, a wildlife garden or a robust garden that has lots of room for people to play football? Some plants will take being bashed by a football more than others.
lf you are at a loss to know what kind of garden to plan, look at lots of pictures online to get ideas.
You can look at my Pinterest pages to get you started with ideas.
They are shown at the bottom of this post.
Happy gardening!
Bye bye everyone – don’t forget to subscribe to my blog!
Love and kisses
Salty Sam
www.christina-sinclair.com
Bill and Bob’s Joke of the Week
Bob: Did you hear that Roger got the school prize again this year for the pupil who was best at recycling?
Bill: Oh really? What did he win?
Bob: The same cup he got last year!
Salty Sam © Christina Sinclair 2015
Unauthorized use and/or duplication of material from this blog without express and written permission from this blog’s author and owner is strictly prohibited.
Links may be used to www.christina-sinclair.com
Picture Gallery
Who will be in your garden?
THE SALTY SAM NEWS DESK
This week, Emily’s mum decided that she wanted to put some new plants in her front garden.
If you ever have to fill a whole garden with plants, you will realize how many you need to fill it up!
This can become very expensive.
A way to reduce the cost is to get plants from family and friends, and if they do not have any to give away, they may be able to give you seeds or cuttings.
Only the smallest of gardens can be filled in a short time. Otherwise, it will take a while to build up your collection.
Auntie Alice said she could give Emily’s mum some lavender cuttings.
Lavender has a well-loved scent, and is a bee-friendly plant too.
Lavender plants fit into gardens that have modern designs and traditional designs as well. Small plants will spread out and fill space over time.
These plants come from Mediterranean regions originally, so they like sunshine.
The name comes from the Latin word lavare which means to wash and has been used in soaps and shampoos and perfumes for hundreds of years.
The flowers can be put in food too.
The flowers can be dried and kept to scent cupboards and drawers.
Lavender is easy to grow. It can be cut back by a third once it has flowered and will grow back year after year and even for decades to come.
French lavender has a softer scent, and English lavender has a stronger scent.
Tender lavender cannot stand really harsh winters, but can survive minus five degrees Celsius. However, you can collect seed to keep over the winter, so you won’t lose the plants completely if we have a bad winter.
You can put lavender in a pot, if you don’t have a garden and have bees visiting you.
It is a top plant to choose if you don’t have much room for a large selection of plants.
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Quick Quiz
Can you name these seven garden tools?
lt’s the Weekend!
HOW TO DESlGN A GARDEN
lf you don’t have a garden, you can make your own imagined garden.
You can draw your plan from above or as a side view.
You can use certain shapes to denote hard landscaping like paths and decks and then lawns, ponds, flower beds, rockeries and walls.
You can use squared paper to keep your scale and measurements on track.
Then you can colour your picture in.
The biggest plants in the garden will be trees.
From above they are drawn as circles. Then they can be coloured in.
Draw your plan first and then colour it in.
Your plan can be small and simple or large and complicated. You can include a house and draw the garden all the way around it.
Your garden can be very formal and have straight, rigid lines or flowing, curvy lines.
Your garden could be for a family or a large community or a school.
Then you can draw planting schemes for each part of the garden.
Your beds might be each side of a path, inside a raised bed or in the middle of a lawn.
You might grow up to be a garden designer with a style of your own.
Please note that the material on this blog is for personal use and for use in classrooms only.
It is a copyright infringement and, therefore, illegal under international law to sell items made with these patterns.
Use of the toys and projects is at your own risk.
©Christina Sinclair Designs 2015
Quick Quiz Answers
- wheelbarrow
- Dutch hoe
- secateurs
- hand trowel
- garden shears
- lawn rake
- besom
https://www.pinterest.co.uk/TheSaltySamBlog/gardens-to-inspire/
https://www.pinterest.co.uk/TheSaltySamBlog/garden-projects/
https://www.pinterest.co.uk/TheSaltySamBlog/flowers/
