How to draw landscape plans

How to draw landscape plans

Are you planning to do any landscaping or hardscaping around your home? It’s not just a good idea to know the dimensions and layout of your property – it’s practically essential. It’s essential to know the size and location of existing structures and utility lines. In addition, knowing where your property begins and ends will allow you to see how your new projects will fit in. That way you don’t cross any property boundaries. And in order to have this information on hand, you’ll need a landscape plan. Drawing a landscape plan can be complicated, so if you’re embarking on a larger-scale project, like adding a swimming pool to your backyard, you’ll most likely want to hire a professional. However, if you’re working on a smaller project, here’s how to draw landscape plans.

What is a landscape plan?

A landscape plan is a visual representation of a site using scaled dimensions. Landscape plans include natural elements like flowers, trees, and grass as well as man-made elements such as lawn furniture, fountains, and sheds. Moreover, landscape designs may also include overlays for irrigation and lighting.

Landscape designs are primarily used to plan the layout for an outdoor area whether it be a personal garden plan for your home or a commercial plan for a business or community area. They’re also useful as a reference when there’s a need for new installation or repair or when planning an outdoor event.

Benefits of landscape plans

  • Landscape plans help you turn your design ideas into visuals.
  • Secondly, landscape plans ensure you have an accurate design of the landscape for future use.
  • Moreover, landscape plans help decision-making on what materials to buy.
  • Landscape plans also ensure the project is completed with minimum hassles.
  • Having an accurate landscape plan with measurements, you can decide what plants, benches and paths you want, and how each item will fit into its position.

How to draw landscape plans

Locate your property’s site plan.

In order to draw a landscape plan, you’re going to need to know the size and scale of your property. You can find this information on your property’s site plan. Usually, a site plan comes with the deed when you purchased your home. If you can’t locate your site plan, or if you believe your site plan is out of date, you’ll need to order a new one.

Consider the scale

This involves determining how you will lay out your design on graph paper. You can decide that one of those little squares on the graph paper will represent, let’s say, 1 square foot of space on your property, thus creating a scale drawing. You’ll do the physical measuring on your property first with your tape measure, then scale those dimensions down so that they’ll fit on the graph paper.

Measure your property

Using the tape measure, determine the length of each of your four property boundaries, then measure the length and width of your house. It’s important to establish precisely where your house sits in relation to your property’s boundaries. This is where those boundary corners that form right angles will come in handy.

Create the outline

A landscape plan begins with a broad overview of the project area. This is your basic outline to which you can slowly add elements. Decide on the area to be depicted in the diagram. This may be difficult due to the open nature of an outside area, but the landscape design should illustrate only the area that is subject to the landscaping. Begin by drawing boundaries of the area. It might be the edge of a garden, the end of the yard, a fence, or any other area beyond which the landscape plan is no longer pertinent.

Add existing features

Add any rocks, waterways, buildings, poles, slopes, etc. that cannot or will not be moved during the landscaping process. Be sure to use the correct symbols and colours for these. In the end, this will aid in the imagination of the area when it is complete. You may also want to note North on your design to help you understand how the sun and shadows may change the landscape.

Sketch it out

Now you get to play around. To audition various concepts, use tracing paper overlays or multiple photo or electronic copies that allow you to try out with different form compositions, paths and proportions. It’s not too early to include elements such as shrubs and patios drawn to scale and placed in different configurations on the grid. Don’t overlook the practical details, such as the placement of irrigation and lighting systems.

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