How to come up with a landscape design

Don’t lie, it’s weird that you come on the website of a landscaping company, only to see an article giving you tips on how to do their job yourself isn’t it? Well, don’t be too bummed out. Apart from the fact that we actually care about you, there are some pretty solid reasons for you to have some knowledge about coming up with your own landscape design. 

The first is, in dealing with landscapers, having an idea of the technical lingo involved in the whole process is very beneficial in helping you get your ideas across to your contractors. Secondly, in dealing with contractors, having knowledge of landscape design could save you some money by allowing you to handle some parts of the project on your own and only paying for what you feel is too advanced for you.

The basic thing behind this is to have a decent grasp of important aspects of creating the perfect environment for you and your family. 

A key question here is, to what level should one learn landscape design? I mean, it’s certainly not something that you can simply just add to the side along with your degree and professional life. Learning landscaping is a long journey, perfecting it is impossible, and getting enough experience to call yourself competent takes a long time. The essence of this article is not to give you some sort of crash course, it’s to give you an introduction and also familiarise you with some key concepts. The hope is that after reading this, you’ll be able to have a conversation about landscaping and not look completely out of place.

As a sidenote though, you could learn the differences between landscaping and lawn care.

So here are a few basics of coming up with a landscape design:

  1. Measure the Area

If you’re gonna design a landscape, you need to have an exact knowledge of how big that area is. This is a task you would have to carry out with your own tape measure physically. You can transfer the dimensions of the area into a graph or on Google Sketch.

An important piece of advice here is to add permanent fixtures in the area into the sketch and to also take note of the direction of the sun, and the patterns of the shadows in the area.

  1. Add in the elements

This is an action that requires the knowledge of all the different elements of designing a landscape. But without going deeply into them, I’ll give you a brief summary of each one and their separate applications.

You can have a patio, gazebo, garden, wood, stones, etc. 

It’s important to know the ramifications of having each of these elements and to know how best they are applied. Each structure you decide to add should be put into your graph and drawn in scale.

  1. Final Draft

Now this is where you draw up your final plans. After deciding on what elements you want to use you have to account for traffic patterns on the landscape. Basically how the flow of air, water, and light will be on the landscape. 

Don’t underrate the importance of researching the various elements of landscape design. Because like a chess board, each element has its uses, applications, advantages, and disadvantages.

At the end of the day if you decide to use the knowledge in this article to inform your decision to pick a landscaper in OKC, that’s 100% fine by us especially if you are in OKC!