Before you start to work out a planting plan on paper, you need to decide what kind of 'look' you would like the planting in your garden to have. For example, do you want your borders to have a definite statement by using modern roses underplanted with spring bulbs? Or would you prefer them to be indefinite and misty, with the accent on cool pastel colours?

You need also to decide how you want the garden to look in each season of the year. For example, a neat and tidy spring planting could give way to a lavish summer border of herbaceous perennials. A pastel summer scheme could increase in colour temperature as the autumn approaches.

You may find it useful to make a list of the factors that will affect your choice of plants in different areas, and keep it as a handy reference. Include factors such as:

• Climate
• exposed or sheltered
• direction of prevailing wind
• average amount of rainfall
• rain shadows
• microclimates that exist or that could be created
• Type of soil
• wet
• dry
• heavy
• light
• acid
• alkaline
• Aspect - not always straightforward: a sunny aspect may be shadowed by a building or a tree.

Noting Shade

Before you start designing, it can be worthwhile to shade in those parts of the plan which will be in shadow for some, or all, of the day. Although there are a wide range of plants that will grow and flower well in shade, this is the aspect of the garden's character most likely to cause difficulties and its importance should not be ignored.

Choosing Plants

You now need to list all the plants which you particularly like, with their main characteristics: for example, their basic requirements and the time of year that they perform.

Adding Plants to the Plan

When adding plants to the plan, most people find it easiest to use a scale of 1:50, to avoid the risk of the plant groupings and accompanying names being too small to be legible. However, there should be no real problems keeping your original scale if your original plan is at a scale of 1:100 and you'd rather not spend time scaling your drawing up.

Place a piece of tracing paper over the outline plan, and pencil in your plant groupings, using an 'x' where each plant is to go. That will enable you to use the plan, in conjunction with a measuring tape and bamboo canes, when you finally plant up your borders. Keep the design simple, particularly if you feel you cannot spare much time on the garden. In this case, it is preferable to use repeating patterns of dependable plants.

It is important to decide how much space each plant should take up on the plan so that money is not wasted by overplanting, or time wasted by underplanting. Take a look at plant encyclopaedias and nursery catalogues to establish maximum height and spread on maturity for your chosen plants. If in doubt, it is often advisable to err on the generous side, especially in the case of trees. In the long run, more harm is done by planting too close together, rather than too far apart.

Your planting plan can be as simple or as complicated as you want. It may help you to use outline shapes and symbols that actually reflect the way a plant grows, such as toothed outlines for shaggy plants or spiky shapes for spiky plants. Such detail is helpful conceptually, but is certainly not essential. Generally, plant herbaceous perennials in odd numbers, both to avoid a boxy look and to ensure that the plants grow together into a group.

Structural Planting

Start your plan with framework or structural planting, such as trees, shrubs, hedges and dwarf conifers. This structural planting can also include ground-covering plants, especially in low-maintenance gardens.

Next, fill in with annuals, perennials, and bulbs. Whilst is it is not compulsory to have every kind of plant represented in the garden (for example, a tree might well be a nuisance in a small garden), it is worth remembering that different kinds of plants perform different tasks (and sometimes more than one), at different times of year, so do not rule out the idea of any one group of plants before you have considered them very carefully.

Colour

The final stage of the planting plan is try to visualise how your intended planting scheme works in practice. On a copy of your structural plan, paint or crayon in the foliage or flower colour. You may want to repeat the exercise for different seasons.

However, do bear in mind that colours can be misleading, tempting you to assume that some plants flower together when they do not, and may lead you to plan for maximum effect for only a short period of the year. No garden should have everything flowering at the same time, so you should expect some green areas on the plan. It will, however, give you a good idea of the overall balance in the finished design.