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To properly be able to plan your dream garden on paper, you’ll need to draw a garden layout. Here are my simple tips for how I do it and all you need is a measuring tape, art tools, and paper. This method helps you to create a to-scale design of your garden so that you can properly plan your growing space. Full video introduction included.
It’s officially been a month since we moved into our new house. I’m sure you’ve been there before, so you’ll understand just how mega stressful and mega exciting it’s been. Boxing things up, moving things, taking a moment to soak in the new home and smile. I’ve been detailing the move, house redecorating, and sharing the new garden on YouTube. The house is small, and the inside is almost finished, so my attention is turning to the garden. I have so many plans for it! Fragrant roses, an edible hedge, and lots of vegetables. I want to design it properly, though, so the first step is drawing a simple garden plan.
Why Drawing a Garden Layout is Important
The back garden is currently a grassy lawn, shrubs, a greenhouse, and some beautiful little fruit trees. It sounds like a lot already, but to a veggie gardener like me, it’s a blank slate. I’ve been dreaming about what will be growing there and have already jumped the gun and purchased a new garden arch. I planned to put it in last weekend but then realized I wasn’t sure where to place it. I’d not even figured out where my garden beds were going.
I also realized that I had no idea how big the garden was or how many four-foot-wide beds I could get in it. Never mind everything else. I needed to take measurements and draw everything out to help me design my new garden. I need a to-scale garden plan in order to plan out the sizes and placement of raised beds, the arbor, and new plants. Without one, garden planning is just guesswork.
Garden Organization Ideas
- How to Organize your garden using the Konmari Method
- The Best Seed Organizer (the product that I use)
- Organize a Seed Swap to Share and Get Seeds for Free
- Deep Clean the Greenhouse with Eco-friendly Products
Measuring the Garden Layout to Scale
Creating a to-scale garden plan begins with measuring everything in the garden. The lengths, widths, diagonals, and distances between certain objects. If you have access to an open reel measuring tape this will be easy. I didn’t and used an ordinary measuring tape, but I think it worked fine. As far as units are concerned, I chose to use feet. However, if most of your available landscaping materials are in meters, then you might want to use metric.
I roughly sketched out the garden and the measurements on a pad of paper — it took about half an hour in total. Looking at it afterward, it was clear that my initial mental model of its size was all wrong. Seeing the numbers put it into perspective.
Drawing a To-Scale Garden Layou
Professional landscapers create beautiful garden plans to present to clients. They’re often illustrated with specific plants and trees and use a 1:50 scale. I’m not selling to anyone other than myself, so a simple garden plan is all I need. I figure that many home gardeners would feel the same.
Many people use a 1 cm equating to 1 metre scale. This is a scale of 1:100
Landscapers would use a drafting table to do their designing. I have a kitchen table and ordinary printer paper to draw on. That meant that the scale I used would depend on how much I could fit on the sheet. I took the width of my garden, just over 33 feet, and found that I could fit it on the paper using 3/16″ to represent every foot. I’m terrible with math, so it was trial and error with working it out on my ruler.
Using basic math, I worked out that 1 inch in real life would equate to 5.33 feet or 64 inches. That makes my to-scale drawing 1:64. Meaning that my drawing is 64 times smaller than my garden truly is. You can choose whatever scale best fits your paper and needs.
Filling in the Details
After I’d created an outline, I filled in the permanent structures, such as the gate, greenhouse, and trees. The shrubs I plan to remove are absent from my final plan. All I used were simple art tools such as a ruler, pencil, eraser, and some colored pens. You can see my thought process in the video below.
Drawing a simple garden plan was a huge help in creating an accurate vegetable garden design. I could see that four long beds could fit, that there was plenty of space for a shed at the back, and where to place my garden arch. Knowing all this gave me the confidence to order roses for the arch and begin thinking about what plants and veg were going where. I’ve also kept a lot of the features I’m planning in pencil since it gives me the flexibility to change things if needed. I hope that my little exercise in amateur garden design will help you create a no-fuss, simple garden plan for yourself.
