The initial design stage is the most important, creative, exciting, and forgiving of all the landscaping steps. Make your first landscaping steps the most fun as well.
First
The process is a simple one: Lay tracing paper over your base plan, sketch all sorts of ideas, then select or change ideas based on how they fit together and solve the problems or accent the features you highlighted on your problem plan.
Ideas
Be sure to give your plan time to evolve. You may consider that ideas may seem limited at first, but they multiply as you play with them and they interact with each other.
- If you want to decide early on if there's a single landscape style - formal, natural, English cottage, etc. - you'd like to adopt.
- Once you've selected a style, you can more readily choose and reject ideas. It saves you time and helps you develop a more unified design.
Bubble Tracings For a start, instead of sketching specific ideas on the tracing paper, draw bubbles representing the possible general use areas you see for the yard: entry, outdoor living, service, etc.
Perhaps most of the front and some of the side, for example, could be entry area.
Accordingly, most of the back and perhaps part of a side yard could be reserved for outdoor living and entertaining. So, drawing these bubbles keeps you thinking in too many specifics too early on.
If you do your bubble tracings of general use areas, you may also want to cut out some smaller bubbles - from any kind of slightly thicker paper - to represent areas that will have a specific use, say a patio, deck, or pool.
You may move these patterns around easily, trying different arrangements within the broader space you've allotted to that general use.
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