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Drawing a Garden Plan
Starting a Site Plan
Learn how to draw an existing site plan of your landscape and use it to explore new landscape features and plantings in easy step-by-step demonstrations with pictures:
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- Where to begin when drawing a site plan.
- How to measure and document features of your site.
- How to orient your site and begin choosing planting areas.
- A step-by-step demonstration of how to draw an existing site plan.
- How to use the site plan to plan a landscape.
Getting Started
Sure success in planting and growing a new landscape begins by making a scale drawing of your site. You’ll use it to explore different approaches, features, and plants before settling on the best solution for your yard.
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An Existing Site Plan
Drawing an exact scale drawing of your site will take some measuring outdoors and a few hours of transferring those measurements to paper. Such drawings—garden plan diagrams—show your site as it would appear to you from above in a drone or aircraft.
Use graph paper with appropriate sized grid measurements to make the drawing on paper with pencils or pens, or choose and use a landscape design computer program according to its directions.
Before beginning, work carefully with measuring tapes and sketches to capture the size and location of the perimeter borders and key features of your site. Many gardeners like to use removable stakes and string to define areas on these sketches.
That process of measuring and drawing a site plan are detailed in the demonstration.
Orienting Your Plan to the Site
Because sunlight is important to the success of your landscape, also note the cardinal directions and how your site is oriented to them. Light preference differs between plants.
In early morning, at noon, and again late in the afternoon, note the location of permanent shadows of structures of trees, measuring and shading them on your sketches with colored pencils.
If you have a magnetic compass, use it to find North and South. (You can also use the sun at true noon—that’s when shadows cast are their shortest for the day—or nighttime stars to find true north. Mark its direction on your drawings.
Step-by-Step Instructions
The demonstration that follows show how to make a scale drawing of your landscape’s future placement on your site. It uses a nearly empty area found in a typical home landscape to show the steps of the site-plan drawing process.
Gather the stakes, string, a measuring tape, a sketch pad or graph paper, an scale ruler, and a drawing compass, then follow these easy steps:
How to Draw a Site Plan
Measure the distances between the corners of your site and the diagonals, noting their length.
If your site is irregularly shaped, use stakes and string to define reference edges, corners, and sides.
If your site’s perimeter is curved, mark and measure the center-point radius and ending points of the curved section.
Choose two easily-accessed corners as reference points you’ll use to taking later measurements.
Using the corners as reference points, locate structures, utilities, plants, paved walks, and other key items within the site.
Measure the distance to them from the reference corners.
As you finish each measurement, write the distances on the sketch and sketch it in place.
Transfer the measurements noted on the rough sketch from the garden to a working diagram of the site, using a scale ruler, a drawing compass.
Many prefer to use a landscape design computer program for this step, but it is as easily done by hand on paper.
The goal is to represent in plan view as exactly as possible the site in your garden.
Use the measurements from the reference corners to add structures, utility outlets, hose bibs, trees, paved areas, any plants you will keep in the new landscape, and other key features to the diagram.
To transfer the measures, place the point of the compass on a reference corner, set its radius to the distance you measured, and mark an arc in the approximate location of the feature.
Repeat this process from the other reference corner. Where the two arcs intersect is the location of the feature.
Complete the site plan by adding orientation directions. Shade and color areas and plantings as desired for clarity.
Make photocopies or printouts for reference.
The finished site plan will become a base drawing for tracing-paper overlays with the new landscape features.
3-D Perspective Site Drawings
While three-dimensional perspective drawings called “elevations” are normally unnecessary for home landscapes, they help provide gardeners with a preview of how their finished landscape will appear.
The demonstration that follows show how to make a 3-D perspective drawing of your landscape plan. You’ll use the same measurements noted on your sketches for the overhead view, or site plan.
Gather a sketch pad or graph paper, an scale ruler, and a drawing compass, then follow these easy steps:
How to Draw A Perspective Plan
Use the same measurements of your site taken during the drawing of the base or site plan.
If new measurements are required, return to the site and follow the same process demonstrated above to measure and transfer location data to your site sketch.
Add notations to your base plan on an overlay of tracing paper for new features, beds, and plantings.
On tracing paper overlaying your site diagram, draw a scaled baseline the same length as the garden site’s width.
Draw vertical lines the mature height of the plants or other features in the landscape to be planted.
Mature trees and other landscape plants have distinctive forms.
Choose a tree and estimate its width and height, scale them to the diagram, and fill in an outline the same shape as the tree.
Repeat for the other elements of the landscape.
Transfer the profiles to the 3-D diagram, placing them in overlays, from front to back.
Fill in each profile with color.
The result is an artist’s rendering showing how the finished landscape will look when it grows in.
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