Christine McCrea Shirley Lew Haidee Parker Richmond Public Library

Planning your garden online

The Garden Design website www.nzdesigns.co.nz/garden/ is an oasis of common sense, laid out in a comforting step-by-step manner. It suggests mapping the existing garden first. Either a scale drawing or an enlarged copy of the site plan will do. Next, a quiz helps people create a wish list for their “dream garden”. Everything on the list will fall into one of four categories: open spaces, planting, paths or features (such as water gardens or gazebos). Detailed tips on each of these items follow. Finally, the original map can be redrawn, incorporating all the desired elements.

“How to be a gardener” www.bbc.co.uk/gardening/htbg/module1/index.shtml from BBC television offers another approach to garden design. The first step is to assess conditions such as light, moisture, temperature and soil type. A follow-up tutorial on how to select appropriate plants is also offered. Other sites that may help once a basic plan has been drawn up include HGTV’s 10 Easy Steps to a Great Garden Design www.hgtv.ca/garden/articles/article3.asp; an Indiana state site called Planning A Garden www.hcmga.org/Planning.html; and Canadian Gardening magazine’s Designing a Garden www.canadiangardening.com/GARDENet/G01-01.html.

Canadian Gardening also features links to online garden calculators www.canadiangardening.com/GARDENet/B01-02.html, such as Burpee Seeds’ “Garden Wizard” plant selector. The Burpee calculator can take criteria such as the amount of sunlight, the desired height of plants and the level of growing difficulty to produce lists of suitable flowers, shrubs and ornamentals.

For inspiration, online gardeners can surf the web to find hundreds of examples of beautiful gardens. Take a virtual tour of Vancouver’s VanDusen Garden www.city.vancouver.bc.ca/parks/parks&gardens/vandusen/ and find out about upcoming events, including a talk on garden design through history. At the Urban Garden site www.urbangarden.com, city dwellers will find gardening hints, plant photos and gardening “to do” lists for each month of the year.

This column and its links can be accessed from the web version of the Richmond Review, found on the Richmond Public Library home page . Free use Internet stations are available at all three branches of the library. Comments and suggestions for future columns may be e-mailed to column@yourlibrary.ca.