Quote from Lee Garden Ninja on 31st March 2026, 6:29 pm

Hi @jane-wilkinso

What a wonderful message to receive, and what a fantastic start you've made. The fact that you're hand-drawing plans, testing your soil pH, observing your aspect at different times of day, and thinking in layers already puts you streets ahead of most people new to garden design. The crayons sound brilliant, by the way. Watercolours can wait until you find you need more of a challenge!

Let me work through your questions properly.

Garden Size Definitions

This is actually more subjective than most people realise, and different designers will give you slightly different answers. Here is my rule of thumb as a professional garden designer:

 

Garden Size	Approximate Dimensions	Approximate Area
Small	Up to 10m x 10m	Under 100m²
Medium	Up to 25m x 40m	Up to ¼ acre (1,000m²)
Large	Anything above ¼ acre	1,000m² and above

 

These aren't rigid definitions, but they give you a useful frame of reference when you're working through the Garden Design for Beginners course material and thinking about scale and proportion in your own space. It's worth noting that how a garden feels in terms of size is also influenced heavily by its shape, how it is divided, and the scale of the planting within it. A well-designed 80 square metre garden can feel considerably more generous than a poorly designed 200 square metre one.

Choosing Plants for a North Facing Clay Garden

This is where your methodical approach is really going to pay off. A north facing garden with clay soil and some waterlogging sounds challenging on paper but it genuinely isn't once you work with it rather than against it. The diagonal split you've observed between the area that catches morning sun and the area that gets none at all is a really important discovery and you should treat those as two distinct planting zones rather than one.

For the shadier section, you want plants that are genuinely shade tolerant rather than those that merely tolerate partial shade. Ferns, hostas, astrantia, pulmonaria, and digitalis are all brilliant performers in north facing conditions.

Given you have both shade and clay to contend with, my guide to the best plants for heavy clay soil in shade is probably the most directly relevant resource on the site for your specific situation and worth working through carefully before you finalise your plant list. For the area that receives some morning sun you have considerably more choice and can start introducing some of the mid-layer shrubs and perennials that need a few hours of light to perform well.

On the clay and waterlogging question, the good news is that your camellias and peonies are already telling you something useful about parts of the garden being more acidic and better draining. Clay can be improved significantly by incorporating plenty of organic matter, grit on heavier areas, and over time by adding compost as a mulch each year. Raised planting on the waterlogged areas is also worth considering. My guide to plants for clay soil has a broader list of reliable performers that pairs well with the shade clay guide above.

The layering approach you're taking with trees, shrubs, perennials, and ground cover is exactly right, and building a grid with colours, heights, and seasonal interest shows real design thinking. When checking plant suitability, always verify three things for each plant: its shade tolerance, its soil preference, and its hardiness rating. The RHS hardiness ratings use an H1 to H7 scale and for a UK garden you want H4 or above for reliable year-round planting.

When to Move Existing Plants

Moving plants around is something we garden designers call editing the garden, and it's one of the most valuable tools you have. Don't feel you need to work around everything that's already there simply because it's established. Gardens are living, evolving spaces and repositioning plants that are in the wrong place is completely normal practice.

For your peonies against the wall, yes you can absolutely move them. The key is timing. Early spring, just as the first shoots are emerging from the ground, is ideal because the plant hasn't yet put its energy into leaf and flower production. Autumn, once the foliage has died back, is the other good window for the same reason. Avoid moving them in full growth during summer as the transplant shock can set them back badly. When you do move them, dig a generous root ball, replant at exactly the same depth they were at before (peonies are particularly sensitive to being planted too deep), and water in well.

Your camellias can also be moved, but they prefer autumn or early spring and need a period of consistent watering afterwards to re-establish. Given they're growing in a more acidic pocket of the garden, think carefully about where you relocate them and whether the new position will offer similar soil conditions.

My north-facing garden guide covers some of the best shrub choices for shaded positions, if you want ideas for what might work well alongside them once they're repositioned.

My guide here on moving shrubs may be helpful too!

Keep going with this. The fact that you're enjoying the process is the most important thing of all, and from everything you've described, you're developing a really sound instinct for how gardens work. Who knows where it leads.

Happy Gardening!

Lee Garden Ninja

Quote from Jasmine on 1st April 2026, 2:30 pm

Hi Lee,

Thank you so much for your very detailed response and your encouragement. This is fabulous - you have such a treasure trove of excellent advice and information and I am working through all this very carefully. I have made a list of the plants you mentioned (I have cut and pasted photos to see what the plants look like as I have no idea just from the name) but I am learning.

One thing I forgot to do was to note down the overlooked parts of the garden and so now I have walked through the garden measuring exactly where the over-looked/lack of privacy points are in the garden and this i will include as  part of the  planting plan.

This is all excellent practice and I appreciate your advice on treating the shaded and unshaded as two separate areas. I would love to plant an espalier apple tree against the wall that gets some sun - would that work do you think? 

Your tip about using tracing paper here is really helpful.  I make each revision of my plan on tracing paper and lay it over the original garden plan to see all the modifications to the original and what goes where. 

I am currently on my third version of the plan. I remembered what you said about not providing the 'clients' with too many different options and I am heeding that piece of advice - I am offering my 'client' (i.e. me and the family) one style but am prepared to tweak different elements within that design. By doing each version on tracing paper I can see the improvements.

It's an excellent way of learning from your  'happy accidents' 🙂 

There is still a lot of wonderful planning to do.

In this property there are 3/4 small/very small garden  areas that almost wrap around the house -  so I am treating each one separately. This is excellent practice for my hand drawn planning 🙂 , learning about soil, aspects, design and mood boards as each one  seems to be different, but again based on your excellent design course I am making sure that there is a  contunuity in design where some elements  are carried through to each of the different 'gardens'.  In this case it is going to be a cotswold stone gravel path.

For example, the main garden is north facing and I am planning of having gravel paths (cotswold stone) leading to different parts of the back garden. The side garden is south facing and I am planning on building some raised veg boxes  and then planting some wild flowers around the edges to attract the bees and pollinators. I desperately want a wisteria over the bay window wall (but i think that might have to be in a pot as the soil is terrible and there is a lot of building rubble under the lawn surface - which is often waterlogged). The same colour/style gravel path will continue from the back garden to this side garden and around the veg boxes.

Another part of the garden is west facing and leads to the front of the house - I have made a plan for this too using a mood board. This again is going to be a cotswold stone gravel path (continuing the themes throughout all parts - even though they are not directly connected) with solar lights leading to the front of the house and again because of the soggy clay soil I will plant lavender in pots or could I plant the pots in the gravel?

Sorry if this message is rather long - but I wanted to let you know that you have unleashed a bit of a garden ninja monster  in me 🙂 

I know this is going to take time to implement,  I am going to measure -->measure -->plan --> measure --> mark and peg --> walk through the design --> create a planting plan (plants) --> before planting place (plants) --> leave them for a while --> plant them. I hope that's right.

Thanks again for helping me on this fabulous journey  and I will keep on gardening happily!!

 

Quote from Lee Garden Ninja on 4th April 2026, 2:10 pm

Hi @jane-wilkinson

This is such a joy to read and it has genuinely made my day! You have absolutely taken the course and run with it in exactly the right way, and the tracing paper revision method you've developed is something professional designers do throughout their careers. Happy accidents are where some of the best design decisions come from.

To answer your espalier apple tree question: yes, a wall that catches some sun is a great candidate for an espalier, particularly if it has a south or west facing aspect. Apple trees trained as espaliers need a few hours of direct sun to fruit well, so as long as that wall is getting reasonable light through the day it should work beautifully and will become a real focal point.

On the wisteria over the bay window, a large pot is absolutely the right instinct given the rubble and waterlogging underneath. Use a quality loam based compost, make sure the pot has excellent drainage, and feed it regularly through the growing season. Wisteria in containers can be spectacular if kept well watered and fed. I have a full wisteria pruning guide on the site which will help you keep it in check once it gets going, because they do like to take over given half a chance!

For the lavender in the west facing gravel area, planting pots directly into gravel is a lovely idea and works really well both practically and visually. The gravel helps with drainage around the pot and looks intentional rather than makeshift. Lavender loves those free draining conditions so it's a perfect combination.

Your planting sequence is spot on by the way. Measure, plan, mark, walk through, place plants before committing, then plant. That patience before putting spade to soil is what separates a considered garden from one that needs constant rethinking.

You've unleashed something wonderful here. Keep going!

Lee Garden Ninja — Garden Ninja