How to Design a Courtyard Garden [part 3]

Hello I am Rachel Mathews from SuccessfulGardenDesign.com. Today we are going to take a look at how to design a small, formal Spanish courtyard garden. The main thing we need to focus on with this garden is the angle of the wall. It's very dominant when you're in the garden. So we need to disguise that and take the eye away from it. The clients have sketched out the type of thing they have in mind. They want some raised bed with planting in because the, the base here is solid concrete left by the builders, so we're not able to plant directly into the soil. The fist thing we need to do, is concentrate on the sidelines and these are the lines that you look down as you come into the garden. The entrance gate is here, so if we draw a line in here and here, you can see that's the main view down the garden, from the entrance. So you can see the clients have more or less got the measurements right from top to bottom, but what they haven't done is measured this point here. Do you remember back to our survey videos where we did every single point from various locations. So you see it's quite a chunk of garden missing there. Now lining things up, you can see that this design just isn't going to work in this base we've got, so this is why it is so important that you measure and then draw you garden up to scale. So let's just draw a certain line from the back of the garden, also there's the garage door here. And we put that in there. So this kind of shows us the areas of space that we've got to play with. It's very important that things line up with this gateway here and we've got to line up this door here. Ok, the design is beginning to come together now, but you can see I just started really simply by drawing in a couple of boxes. Just to see what I can do with the space. If you start your design by thinking of the empty areas of space first, and then whatever area is left, that's what you turn into a raise borders. So for example, this area here could be a raised border. And with lots of plants in there and then we can do the same the other side with a raised border. Maybe put in a water feature here. And maybe some sitting in here, and we got room to do it the other side. Then these areas here, they could be plant borders also. Maybe a slightly different height, giving it more interest. Now they wanted an illusion mirror at the end, so that could go in there. So we've got room for planting all around here, we've got the seats in here. I am going to go about like this a little bit more and will come back once I've got something a bit more presentable. So coming into the entrance gate, the water feature that is here lines up nicely with that. And then you've got a path around it, which happens to line up with the center of back of the garden. And all of these raised planting beds here, that is all one continuous line along there which adds symmetry and balance to the garden and the same around here. So everything lines up and it creates a sense of space and it also takes you these dominant squares which are lined up with the house take your eye away from this very dominant wall. Well I hope you've enjoyed this video tutorial on how to design courtyard garden. If you have any questions, please drop me a line at SuccessfulGardenDesign.com