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Are you trying to tackle the challenge of designing or changing your garden to suit your family? No matter the size of your household or the age of your children, here are some helpful tips to give you a hand.
Keep Your Goals in Mind
What kind of space do you want to create with your garden? It’s important to decide on this before designing or making any additions. Consider everyone’s interests and what’s appropriate for their age – for example, you might want to use the area to dine with your family, focus on gardening, keep fit outdoors with gym equipment, grow produce, or allow your children to play sports like padel and badminton. If you have lots of goals or reasons to change your garden, divide it up to suit the entire household and their needs. This will all inform what it should include and look like.
Get Inspired
You can find green inspiration in all sorts of places. Read garden magazines, use social media platforms like Pinterest to source ideas and create virtual pinboards, or collate things you like in a physical mood board. Visit the outdoor spaces of family and friends or larger gardens at stately homes and National Trust sites. You never know where you’ll see something you love and want to replicate in your everyday life, so always have your camera handy!
Be Prepared
Planning out the space ahead of time once you have some solid ideas will save you headaches later on. Get out the measuring tape to size everything up and then sketch your layout to start making things a reality – garden designers can help if you’re really stuck. Consider landscaping like paving, decking and grass before moving onto flowerbeds, play spaces and ways to ensure privacy. Also, find out the type of soil you have so you can look into which plants will grow best there, and which way your garden faces so you can place a family dining area in the sunniest part and put only plants that will thrive there in the shade.
Major changes can be expensive. Therefore, if you’re on a budget, why not consider tweaking existing features to reduce costs, such as cleaning and painting old decking instead of completely replacing it? Work to the strengths of your space and plan around the weaknesses too. For example, by preserving a beautiful view, or putting up a privacy screen if your garden is very open to neighbours. You should enforce its security if you have pets so that they don’t escape, and make sure your garden can be used all year round by putting up an outdoor canopy if it takes on the heat of the sun all day in summer.
Think About Materials
A family garden needs to be safe for everyone. Softer materials like grass might be more suitable for households with younger children, and large amounts of decking might become hazardous for them in wet weather. If you have older kids, paths are great for bike and roller-skating tracks, while stone and gravel can provide a natural look with varied textures that are visually pleasing. Fabric canopies like shade sails can add a different dimension and materials to outside spaces too, and they’re useful for setting up relaxation areas for all ages.
Find the Perfect Plants
One thing that every garden needs is plants. The amount you should add obviously depends on your family’s interest in gardening, but remember that many children love getting involved, even if they haven’t had a go before! Think about what style you want to evoke with your plants, whether it’s modern, traditional or exotic. A kitchen garden encourages everyone to dig in with growing vegetables to enjoy in future months, while Mediterranean gardens are fun for summer as they’re bright and colourful. Children can really engage with the different sights, scents and textures in a sensory garden – such as vibrant flowers, fragrant honeysuckle and rustling grasses – but make sure to always keep kids safe in the sun when they’re out exploring.
What’s more, you should pick your plants based on your family’s lifestyle. Do you have enough time to maintain a garden that features lots of flowers that need frequent deadheading, or vegetables that need watering? Look into low-maintenance shrubs and things like strawberries and courgettes if you want to grow plants and produce without spending too much time caring for them. And, different colours evoke different moods – so if you or the kids need to chill out after a stressful day at work or school, you could create a relaxing palette of whites and blues in the garden. Alternatively, if you want to use it to entertain, something more energetic like pops of purple and pink could work well.
Designing or altering a garden to suit your family can be complicated, but hopefully, the ideas in this blog will make things simpler and get you started on your journey to setting up that perfect outdoor space for everyone to enjoy.
