Garden Design and Creation

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© Mike Greaves 2006

How to draw up the Site Plan

You can download the directions for our Internet Design Service which contain similar instructions.

First choose a scale – for most gardens, 1:50 gives good detail, while 1:100 may be easier for larger gardens. Work out how big a piece of paper you will need for your garden at your chosen scale.

Some so-called ‘experts’ recommend graph paper, but it is better to work on a big sheet of blank paper with scale rule, set square and compasses if you can, remembering that gardens are rarely rectangular. Squares will distract you when you come to design.

Equipment

You will need a sharp pencil – a technical pencil is best as this never needs sharpening – and a soft eraser! Most designers prefer to use heavy gauge tracing paper and mark in ink, using a sharp scalpel to erase (or increasingly they use CAD software).

A scale rule saves working out scales in your head (and getting them wrong!)

A drawing board with parallel motion and an adjustable set square is ideal, because then you can quickly draw parallel sides at any angle to the page. A board and T-square will do instead.

A large pair of compasses (or trammels) is very useful for triangulating.

Draw up the plan in a logical sequence:

a.    Start with the house (making sure you leave enough room for the garden!)

b.    Then add the boundary corners. You can use a pair of compasses to draw arcs from the two points on the house – the point where the arcs cross gives you the corner of the boundary.

c.    Plot the other features and level changes.

d.    Draw any cross-sections at the same scale.

e.    Indicate the direction of north.