It's research time! To create a realistic garden design that will stand the test of time, you need to understand your soil type, how light falls across your garden and your garden's individual microclimate. Skip this step at your peril!
Welcome back to our series of articles on how to design a garden. In our first guide, we covered making your wish list. Once you've done that, you're ready to move onto the research phase.
To create successful garden designs, you need to understand your garden, and I mean really understand it. This step takes time, which is why many people skip it, particularly new homeowners who just want to get on and create their dream garden, but it can prevent costly mistakes. Ideally, you want to spend a full year observing your garden, seeing where the sun falls at different times of year and how the subtleties of the landscape affect your garden's microclimate. In established gardens, you will also get to know what plants are already in the garden – you may get some pleasant surprises.
Â
Soil type
Understanding your soil type (whether it's clay, sandy, chalky, loam, silt or peat) and the pH of your soil means you can choose plants that thrive rather than die. It's always easier to choose plants to suit your soil rather than trying to adapt your soil to your plants' needs. Some people jump straight to raised beds, and this can work well for small gardens, but they are expensive to construct, so let's assume you want to work with what you've got.
To find out which type of soil you have, take a handful of moist soil or mix some dry soil with a little water and squeeze it together until it forms a ball. If you have a large garden, it's worth taking samples from different beds in case the soil type varies.
If your soil ball crumbles, you likely have sandy soil. If it looks smooth and sticks together, it's probably clay. Silt and loam soils fall between these two extremes. Chalky soil often has visible pieces of chalk in it. You can also add some soil to a cup of vinegar to see if it froths. Few gardens have peat soils.
You can find out the pH of your soil with a home testing kit or by sending a soil sample off to a laboratory. A pH of 7.0 is neutral. Acidic soils have a pH lower than 7.0 and alkaline soils have a pH higher than 7.0. A pH of 6.5 is considered optimal for most plants.
Â
Sunlight and aspect
Knowing which parts of your garden are in sun and shade at different times of the day helps you decide on your garden layout (in particular, where you want seating areas) and which plants you put where.
First, identify which way your garden faces. You can use a compass or the compass app on your phone. Open the app and stand in your garden with your back to the house. Look at which direction points to the bottom end of your garden – this is the direction your garden "faces". If you have a handheld compass, you'll need to twist the housing so the red compass needle lines up with north before looking down the line of the compass to see which direction your garden faces.
Once you know which direction your garden faces, you can work out when different parts of your garden will be in the sun, taking into account the shading effect of boundary walls and hedges. For example, if you're looking out over a south-facing garden, a garden bed on the left-hand boundary will be west-facing (so will get the sun in the evening) and a garden bed on the right-hand side will be east-facing (and will catch the morning sun).
The next step is to see how the sun travels across your garden to determine which parts of the garden are in full sun, partial shade or full shade. You'll see these categories on plant labels, and the definitions are as follows:
Full sun: At least 6 hours of direct sun per day
Partial shade: 3–6 hours of direct sun per day
Shade: Less than 3 hours of direct sun per day
These timings are based around midsummer, when the sun is at its highest. To fully understand how light shapes your garden, it's important to map where the sun falls at different times of the year. This will also take into account any shading caused by surrounding buildings or large trees. For example, our garden is south facing, but we have a tall, dense hedge along the back and side of the garden, which means the bottom part of the garden is in shade for almost the entire day.
If you're prepared to live a year with your garden before committing to a garden design, here's my lazy way to track the sun at different times of year:
-
Set a reminder in your calendar app for the summer and winter solstices and the spring and autumn equinoxes. You can set a reminder for the same day each month to get a more detailed picture, but once per season will give you a reasonable overview.
-
On each date, go out into your garden every hour and take a photograph (you may want to set a reminder for this too!). If you're struggling to capture the whole of your garden, you can take multiple pictures or take the photo from an upper floor window. If you can't manage every hour, make sure you get photos in the morning, at midday, mid-afternoon and evening. Save these photos to an album in your photo app so you can easily find them again.
-
At the end of the year, you can pull up the seasonal photos on your computer (which should be date and time stamped) and group them to see which parts of your garden are in the sun at different times of the day during each season.
Â
Exposure
Strong winds can cause damage to plants, dry out your soil and disrupt pollination. The direction the wind comes from is just as important as the strength of the wind – cold northerlies early in the growing season can kill off the precious seedlings you've spent weeks nurturing.
For any garden, it's worth identifying the prevailing wind direction; that is, the direction wind travels across your garden most of the time. Across the UK, the most common prevailing wind comes from the south-west or west. However this can vary depending on your local topography and seasonal variations (northeasterly winds can be as common in spring as southwesterlies).
The Global Wind Atlas can give you a high-level overview of typical wind directions and speeds for your area, and you can get a good idea of how exposed your garden is simply by standing out in it and looking at the surrounding landscape. But winds are fickle, and to get a full picture, you also need to understand your garden's microclimate.
Â
Microclimate
No two gardens are the same, and your garden will have specific features that affect growing conditions in different parts of the garden. This may be a garage wall that soaks up the sun during the day or a fence or dense shrub that creates a sheltered area in an exposed garden.
Winds can be strongly influenced by microclimates. My last house stood at the crest of a slight hill, which meant that one side of the garden caught all the wind going – we were constantly having to replace fence panels, and planting a hedge that let some of the wind through would have been a better long-term option. If you have a significant dip or change of level in your garden, watch out for frost pockets – areas where cold air gets trapped in winter. Depending on the topography of your local area, your entire garden could be affected by early and late frosts.
Understanding your garden's microclimate means you can work out the best place to site delicate plants and sheltered seating areas. You can incorporate additional windbreaks if needed, and you won't end up investing in costly fencing that will get taken out in the first storm!
Research complete? The final step before you dive into garden design ideas is to create a scale drawing of your garden. I'll cover how to do that in Part 3.
