Landscape Symbols And Garden Plans
Every good garden is the result of a landscape plan. It is just as important for you to have a plan of your proposed garden on paper before you start to work, as it is for carpenters, plumbers, and electricians to have a blueprint of a house they intend to build. Since few of us have ever come in contact with a landscape plan in our everyday lives, it may be necessary for us to discuss in detail the methods of making and using one.
Making a serviceable landscape plan does not require artistic ability. All you need is the right equipment for measuring and drawing, and the mathematical intelligence to uniformly reduce various-sized objects to a fraction of their size.
Drawing Equipment
The equipment needed to make a good landscape plan includes: drawing board (or flat table), T-square, two triangles (45 and 60 degrees), protractor, compass, tape measure, scale (or ruler), pencil, eraser, scotch tape, and tracing paper.
Landscaping Symbols
Landscape symbols are used in making landscaping plans. They are easy to learn, understand, and interpret. They are used in illustrations throughout many landscape design books. Become completely familiar with this landscape shorthand and you will find that understanding and making landscaping plans is not at all difficult.
A few minutes of practicing (you might call it “doodling”) will get you to the point where drawing these landscape items becomes easy and enjoyable. The next step is to learn to locate on a simple plan of a piece of property the existing buildings, walks, driveways, established trees, rock formations, gullies, hills, fences, etc., that you might find on it.
Field Notes
This task can be divided into two parts or stages. The first consists in the taking of field notes in the form of rough sketches as well as dimensions and actual descriptions. The second stage consists of transferring your field notes to drawing paper in proper scale and proper relation to each other. What you get is comparable to a thoroughly labeled photograph taken from directly above the site. You must have this top view before you start working on the overall landscape design of the property.
Taking field notes is much simpler if a copy of the blueprints of the house is available. This should be one of the first things you obtain from your architect, or from the builder who sells you the house. If you purchase from a previous owner, ask if he has the blueprints just like having an indoor houseplants pictures in selecting a house plant to buy, for they as well as the house should become your property and you can have an indoor houseplants pictures to where you can put your plants.
You will be still better off if you also obtain an official plan of the property with the location of the house marked in by the surveyor. Always try first to get such a plan; it will save you many hours of field work. If it is not available, the following procedure is offered as a way of cutting this job down to a minimum. It is the result of quite a number of years of practical experience.
