Garden design

Good gardens start on paper. Before you buy a single plant or bag of gravel, it pays to know how you want to use the space, where the sun falls and what the ground is really like underfoot.

Start with how you use the garden

Write down what actually happens outside: where the washing dries, where the bins live, where children kick a ball, where you would sit with a coffee at seven in the evening. A layout that ignores these routines gets worn into desire lines and muddy corners within a season.

Follow the light

Spend a day noting where the shade lies at nine, one and six o'clock. South- and west-facing corners suit seating and sun-loving plants; the damp, shaded side of a fence is where ferns, hostas and woodland bulbs earn their place. Most planting failures trace back to a plant in the wrong light.

Build a structure first

Paths, edges, hedges and a few evergreen shapes give a garden its bones in winter. Once the structure reads well from the back door, seasonal planting can be looser and more experimental without the whole plot looking untidy.

Small gardens

In a small space every surface counts. Use one or two paving materials rather than five, repeat a limited plant palette, and think vertically with climbers and wall-trained shrubs. A single well-sized tree or multi-stem shrub often does more than a scatter of small plants.

Show gardens as a source of ideas

Flower show gardens are built to be looked at for a week, but they are still a good place to study plant combinations, materials and proportion. Take photos of the details, not the whole scene, and ask which ideas would survive a wet February in your own garden.