Most garden design projects go wrong before a single plant is bought or a spade goes into the ground. They go wrong at the thinking stage — or rather, the absence of it. Someone visits a garden centre in early April, gets swept up in the colour and the optimism of a warm spring day, buys forty-three things that took their fancy, and arrives home to find that approximately none of them work together, half are wrong for the conditions, and there is nowhere obvious to put any of them.
Good garden design is not about having expensive taste or a professional education. It is about asking the right questions before you start spending. The ten questions below will not design your garden for you, but they will prevent you from making the kinds of decisions you will be quietly regretting three summers from now.
1. Who is this garden actually for?
This sounds obvious, but the honest answer is frequently more complicated than it first appears. A garden used primarily by young children needs to be thought about very differently to one used primarily by adults for entertaining. A household with a large dog needs to factor that in before committing to a planting scheme. Someone who wants to grow vegetables has fundamentally different priorities to someone who wants a low-maintenance space that looks presentable from the kitchen window.
Write down the actual users of the garden and what each of them needs from it. Not what you would ideally like, but what the garden is genuinely, realistically going to be used for on a Tuesday evening in June. Designing around that list produces better results than designing around an aspirational image of how the garden might look in an ideal world.
2. How much time are you honestly prepared to spend on maintenance?
Every gardener believes, at the point of planting, that they will maintain things properly. The herbaceous border will be divided every three years. The hedges will be clipped twice a season. The lawn will be fed and scarified and aerated and treated as the thing of calibrated perfection it deserves to be.
Most of them are wrong. Life intervenes. Enthusiasm fluctuates. The garden that looked manageable in spring becomes oppressive by August. The single most important factor in long-term garden satisfaction is choosing a planting style and maintenance regime that actually matches the time you have, not the time you wish you had. Be realistic about this — almost brutally so — and design accordingly.
3. What does the garden look like in January?
January is the month that honest gardeners use to judge their own work. Walk around your garden on a grey January morning, or stand at the kitchen window with a coffee and look at it properly. What is there? If the answer is not much — bare soil, leafless sticks, a lawn that has seen better days — then you have a structural planting problem that no amount of summer annuals will fundamentally fix.
Winter interest should be built into the design from the start, not retrofitted as an afterthought. Evergreen structure, interesting bark, persistent seedheads, early bulbs, plants grown specifically for their winter stems: these are the elements that keep a garden looking considered rather than abandoned during the months when it gets the least attention and deserves the most.
4. Where does the sun go?
Observe your garden at different times of day and at different times of year before making significant planting decisions. The sunny corner that seems perfect for a Mediterranean herb garden may be in shade by mid-afternoon in winter. The north-facing border might get more light than you expect once the deciduous tree behind it drops its leaves in October.
A few minutes with a compass app and a notebook recording where light falls at 9am, 12pm, and 4pm in spring and autumn will save you considerably more time in remedial plant moving later. Placing plants in conditions they genuinely need rather than conditions that seemed reasonable is one of the most effective things you can do to improve garden performance.
5. What is your soil actually like?
Clay, sandy, chalky, loam, or peat. Acid, neutral, or alkaline. Wet or free-draining. These variables determine what will genuinely thrive in your garden and what will struggle regardless of how attentively it is cared for. A soil testing kit costs very little and fifteen minutes spent taking samples from different parts of the garden will tell you more useful information than any amount of browsing. The results should inform your plant choices far more than personal preference does. There is little point falling in love with Rhododendrons if your soil pH is 7.5, and growing Lavender in heavy clay will always be a source of disappointment rather than pleasure.
6. What are you trying to screen or hide?
Most gardens have something that would benefit from thoughtful concealment. A compost area. An oil tank. A side return full of recycling bins. A neighbour’s extension that sits unhappily on the skyline. A shed, however practical, that is not necessarily a visual asset from the main seating area.
Identifying these early and incorporating screening into the design — rather than trying to add it later — produces far more integrated results. A pleached hornbeam hedge, a climbing plant on a trellis panel, a strategically positioned specimen shrub: these work as design elements when planned, and look like cosmetic patches when added as an afterthought. Speaking of sheds — if yours is due for replacement or you’re considering adding one, it is worth planning its position carefully at the design stage and choosing something that sits sympathetically in the space.
Dobbies has a well-stocked range of garden sheds in various sizes and styles, which makes it easier to find something that suits the aesthetic of the garden rather than simply defaulting to whatever is cheapest and most prominent.
7. What do you want to hear?
Sound is a dimension of garden design that is almost never discussed in books or television programmes, but which makes an enormous difference to how a garden feels to sit in. Running water masks road noise with surprising effectiveness — even a small container water feature can transform the acoustic quality of an urban garden. Grasses rustling in the wind, bamboo canes clicking against each other, the sound of bees in a lavender border: these are elements that make a garden feel alive and serene simultaneously.
Conversely, consider what sounds the garden generates that you might want to minimise. Hard landscaping reflects noise; soft planting absorbs it. A garden bounded by solid walls and covered in stone can be uncomfortably loud during outdoor dining when several people are talking. These are not usually the first things people think about, but they are worth considering before the hard landscaping is committed to.
8. How do you want to move through the space?
Circulation — the way people naturally move around a garden — is one of the most revealing tests of whether a design is working. Desire lines that cut across lawns where paths should be, seating areas that require a long walk from the kitchen, steps that feel awkward or unsafe in wet weather: these are symptoms of a design that has not fully thought through how the garden gets used in practice.
Before finalising any design, physically walk the routes you will actually take. From the back door to the lawn. From the seating area to the barbecue. From the gate to the shed. These journeys happen every day; making them feel natural and comfortable is one of the most valuable investments a garden design can make.
9. What is the view from inside the house?
A garden is not only experienced from within it. It is viewed constantly from inside the house — from the kitchen sink, from the sitting room sofa, from the bedroom window on a winter morning. Designing with these fixed viewpoints in mind, rather than purely for the experience of being in the garden, tends to produce spaces that feel continuously rewarding rather than occasionally spectacular.
The classic mistake is to design the garden as a series of things to look at when standing in the middle of it, without considering what it looks like as a composed picture from the house. Stand at each window that overlooks the garden and think about what would make each view better. A specimen plant on that sightline. A lit feature for winter evenings. A structural element that gives the view a focal point even in January.
10. Are you designing for now, or for ten years from now?
Gardens are not finished things. They are processes, moving through time, changing as plants grow and the world around them changes. A design that accounts for this — that plans for how things will look in a decade, not just at planting — produces fundamentally more satisfying results than one that is optimised for year one.
This means thinking about the eventual size of trees and large shrubs before planting them. It means not overcrowding perennials to get an instant effect if the long-term result will be a congested, competitive mess. It means accepting that some of the best elements of a garden — a well-established hedge, a mature climbing rose, a tree that has grown to provide real structure and shade — take years to arrive, and planning for them rather than replacing them with faster alternatives.
The garden you want in ten years is planted today. That is both the frustration and the particular satisfaction of the whole endeavour. Knowing what you are planting towards, rather than simply planting enthusiastically in April and hoping for the best, is the difference between a garden that develops a genuine character over time and one that stays perpetually unresolved.
Answer these ten questions honestly before you buy a single thing, and you will already be designing better than most people ever manage.
