Designing Your Garden: The Preliminary Design

Spatial design is a wonderful way to define your garden spaces and determine planting bed locations. Luckily there is a process to lead us through this exciting design journey. A few weeks ago I began introducing the design process through bubble diagrams, then garden structure studies. This post will now highlight the next step: the preliminary design.  

The preliminary design builds on the garden structure study by adding the location of plant and hardscape materials, though plants are not yet identified. The goal of this step is to create an engaging plan in which someone can start to imagine them self in it. It shows just enough detail to get valuable feedback from the client. Once final changes are made, a master plan would be created as the last step. It is this final plan that would identify plants, include a plant schedule, plus show any necessary elevations and sections for construction.