My Recommended Books

Here are a few of my favourite books to get you started.

The Confident Gardener - Introduction

Welcome to the first post in the The Confident Gardener series. I thought I'd take the opportunity to explain the idea behind The Confident Gardener and what I hope you will get out of these posts.

Through my work as a Landscape Architect I have been involved in a number of garden design projects for private individuals. With every project I have worked on the most satisfying aspect of the work has been watching the client gain the confidence to make their own decisions and start to design the scheme themselves. I believe that your garden is so personal to you that you are the best person to create it.

Having a professional designer help you is often a good trigger to start the process and a talented designer can help you create far more than you ever imagined. However, it is quite possible for you to create your own garden on your own and I believe that the main barrier to this is not time or money but lack of confidence.

With this in mind I hope to guide you through the steps to help your confidence with the aim of encouraging you to create your own design. The steps that I'll look at are

• Am I Worth It? - we often neglect our own interests in favour of other people's needs. A look at how to work round this and how to be realistic about what we can achieve.

• Go Compare - looks at the often unfair comparisons we make between our achievements and those shown in the media.
  

• What Am I Already Good At? - we often overlook our achievements and talents.
  

• What Do I Really Want? - unrealistic expectations can get in the way of a good design so we'll look at limiting the scope to make designing easier and more successful.

• Drawing Skills - you don't need to be artistic to draw up your ideas. We look at tricks to allow you to create an easy to follow plan.

• SAD (Survey, Design and Analysis) - the technique used by professionals that can be used by you to work out the logical locations for features you want to include.

• Planting without the Latin Names - with so many different plants available choosing your planting list can be overwhelming. We look at how to narrow down the criteria by concentrating on the final effect you want to create and then looking at suitable plants.

Kindest regards,
The Confident Gardener