D-I-Y Landscape Design; A Personal Reflection

Allow your home and landscape to be a personal reflection of your favorite styles, concepts, colors and shapes. Coming up with the perfect design for your yard can be a difficult task. However at the end of the project, you will be leaving a personalized legacy in your yard for years to come. In this entry we will look at the steps you should follow when creating a landscape design.

Before putting pencil to paper, take a walk around your neighbourhood and go to your local garden/stone suppliers for inspiration. Bring a camera with you and take pictures of ideas, design and plants that catch your eye. Also pick up a few books or catalogs that you can look back at for ideas. Check out this video called "Principles of Landscape Design" to see how contrast, texture, color, scale, repetition and rhythm all play important roles when designing a landscape.

First thing you need is a site layout of your property. The property survey that came with your house is preferred since it shows property lines, utilities and is to scale. If you don’t have that you can do a simple sketch or computer drawing of your property.


Inventory - This is the first step of creating your design. Go around your home and take an inventory of existing site conditions. These can include: sun rise and set, wind, elevations/drainage, existing plants, heavy shade/sun, good and bad views, noise, soil conditions etc.


Analysis – This is where you look at you site conditions in your inventory and start to create very basic ideas for these spaces. The objective of this is not to put thought into the material or design of the space but just to allocate areas.







Program – Looking at the spaces you created in your analysis start to think of different ideas, structures and materials that could be used in this area. Do this in a chart form. Maybe planting a shade tree or building a shade structure in the sunny location or installing a type of screen or tree line to block out that bad view. The more ideas you can come up with for these spaces the better. Never limit yourself to a single idea; the more you put on paper the more you have to choose from.


Concept Plan – This is the stage where you start putting your ideas into a design. Reflect back on your program and begin to lay out how you want your spaces used and shapes for that area. You should begin laying out garden bed areas and where you want to see hardscapes or landscape features.



Planting Plan – Once you have a good idea where your hardscapes are going you can start choosing specific plants for the garden beds you laid out in the concept design. Look back at the inventory design to see lighting and soil conditions to ensure the plant is in the right growing conditions.


Master Plan – In this stage you will look to finalize garden bed shapes and the specific materials, patterns and layout of your hardscape structures. If your unsure of materials stop in at your local stone supplier and they usually have product guides and display that can help in your decision. Adding color is a nice finishing touch making the design much easier to read.




Creating beautiful designs takes many years to perfect. Take your time and use it as a reference when you start installing your landscape. Following these steps can help you create a realistic design and help you visualize your dream back yard before putting a shovel in the ground!

Here are some links that can help provide you with some inspiration. They will show you different styles and ideas that can be used in your landscape design:

Landscape Design Advisor

Home and Garden Landscaping

The Landscape Design Site

This is a very useful forum where you can ask questions regarding design, plants and installation: Landscape Design Forum