Old Diaries-planning the next year of your garden

Happy New Year!

Photocopy the year planner and try and make it quite big, A3 size ideally.

Make up a key, e.g. bl=blue. R=red wh=white etc etc.  flo=flower, ber=berry, ac=autumn colour, etc. etc.

Divide your garden into areas and A1 can be area one and A2 can be area two.  Etc etc .  

So it is January the first and you walk around your garden and you spot some white berries on a shrub and some pink flowers on another shrub.

You can then transpose that information on to your year planner.  So you may put in January the first square A 2 wh ber, meaning in the area two you have a white berried shrub.  Also in that square you would have put something like pk for pink and flo for flower.

Each day you repeat this operation and transpose your findings onto the year planner and by the end of the year you will have a good idea as to where and when you have colour weaknesses.

Goodness me, while analysing this year planner, we only have white in August and no blue in June.  

The advantage of finding out your colour weakness within the garden as a whole, or in a specific area of the garden, is that you can then intelligently move forward with adding or enhancing your existing planting schemes around your garden.

It is so easy to forget when and where the colours are and it's very simple to, at least, get the main framework of the garden into an easily accessible planner, which will then allow you to add any new purchases on to that planner and equally if a shrub has to be removed for a reason, you can also remove that from the year planner.

This has to be the most simple and effective way especially if you have taken on new established garden and you feel a little daunted over how to proceed.  Good luck

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