BACK YARD GARDEN PLANS
My backyard has been the biggest development since we moved into this house. The front yard had plenty of defined flower beds that I was able to just add new plants to but the backyard was more or less a blank slate. We have a huge, established arborvitae hedge along the left side with a garden bed underneath that I’ve been adding to. The right side is a bit less developed but I did add in four arborvitaes for some winter interested in 2019. Otherwise, the yard has a nice curvy patio and the entire back of the yard is a green wall of trees. It’s a bird haven and our cats love being out there in their tents or on their leashes :)
Before I get into some more of the technical drawing techniques, let me explain my ideas for the backyard this year. I wanted to continue the left side garden bed and curve it around to the patio. There will be a path through that bed that leads you to the backyard and then two more paths off the patio for yard access as well. Then we’ll add another garden bed to the right, also butting up against the patio. There is direct sunlight for most of the morning and early afternoon on the edge of our patio and while I love looking out at the expanse of green grass and trees, I think we could pop in a bit more color near the patio and liven things up a bit.
I wanted to try out a new design technique for the backyard beds. The graph paper drawings I did for my vegetable garden plans earlier this month were great technical practice but since my plans for the backyard don’t have any precise measurements, I figured I could whip out the ol’ iPad and get to drawing.
I was looking at getting Procreate but decided on the Concepts app since it was 1. free and 2. had everything I was looking for all within a basic interface - layers, pen options, and plenty of colors. I also have a knockoff Apple Pencil from Amazon that has been a really fun tool to use with the iPad.
After the very scientific method of laying down some sticks where I want the new beds to be, I imported some pictures from my backyard and got to drawing! You can scroll through the photos below to see the progression of how the drawing came together. This was my first time doing a drawing like this and the first time using an app like this so I just played around with the layers and did what made sense to me.
I began with a layer that just had my photograph at around 50% transparency so I could easily see the lines I was going to draw on top. I made another layer called sketch - layers can be seen to the left of the photograph and you can click the eyeball to turn them on/off and can lock them to avoid accidentally erasing something from a previous layer - and drew the basic outline of the house, patio, and garden beds. In my third layer, I drew in the background colors for the patio, grass, and garden bed. Layer 4 is where the fun comes in: plants! I did my best at drawing in some (mostly) deer resistant plants, which I’ll go into detail about below. Then layer 5 just has some plant labels because I was trying to be ~professional.
And that’s it! It took me about 30 minutes to get comfortable with the software (and find the dang eraser) then this first drawing took me about 1.5 hours or so. Using the different types of brushes to add in dimension and textures was fun to play around with. I think ideally I’d have a plant image bank where I could just drag and drop in my previously-drawn images but I’m not sure that’s available with the free version of Concepts.
Below is the drawing for the second garden bed:
The Planting Plan for this garden is to be as deer resistant as possible, while also throwing in some fun annuals that I can keep the deer away from with some deer repellant. The fun annuals they might love to munch on are mostly the Suncredbile Sunflowers. I’ve seen Garden Answer and How’s It Growing use them and I think they look absolutely delightful and worth the effort it will take to keep the deer away. For the shrubs, I drew in a Butterfly Bush, Viburnum, Arctic Fire Dogwood, and some evergreen Boxwoods. I don’t necessarily have specific varieties in mind and will just get whatever I find locally later this spring. I hope to sprinkle in some of the Creeping Thyme, Echinacea, and Yarrow I’m growing from seed, as well as adding in a little lavender hedge near the new pathway. The Spirea, Daisies, Coreopsis, and Salvia are all items I have elsewhere in my garden and love the look of, so I’ll add more in here. The beds are ~4ft deep so if I have extra room I’ll pop in a few more annuals here and there.
Overall, using the Concepts app was pretty easy and fun. The interface is a lot less intimidating than something like Photoshop and it’s easy to navigate around with the (fake) Apple Pencil. It is also on an infinite canvas, so you can scroll out or to the sides of the images and make notes, drawings, etc.
We begin tearing up the grass this week so get ready for some progress reports!