Moving into a new-build home comes with a blank canvas for your garden – often quite literally. With minimal landscaping and compacted soil, new-build gardens can feel uninspiring and even daunting at first. But with careful planning and thoughtful design, you can transform this space into a beautiful, functional garden that suits your lifestyle.
Before rushing to plant flowers or lay turf, take the time to map out your garden’s potential. Consider how you’ll use the space—whether it’s for relaxing, entertaining, growing vegetables, or creating a haven for wildlife. A well-planned approach will help you avoid costly mistakes and ensure your garden grows into a space you truly love.
Start with a Measuring Tape, Paper, Pencil & a Cup of Tea!
Begin by creating a scale drawing of your garden using squared paper with 2cm per metre. Mark out the house walls, fencing and any inspection covers, drains and sewers or utilities such as internet cables if you know where they are. Consider if your garden slopes steeply and if terracing with retaining walls is needed. If it is, this must be done first.
Have Your Purpose in Mind
Decide on the priorities for your household.
Do you have young children who will need grass to run around on?
Do you intend to grow your own vegetables or keep hens?
Do you have a passion for wildlife?
Do you need access for someone with mobility issues?
By deciding on the purpose of your garden first you are more likely to succeed in creating a space that you will use.
Once you have decided on the purpose and function, keep it in mind through all stages of the designing process. It is easy to get sidetracked by pretty plants and other features that are not practical for your needs. Most new-build gardens are small, so choosing one or two main functions works better than trying to fit in everything. A cluttered mix of features often doesn’t work in limited space. Think about how you’ll use the garden most of the time, rather than designing it for rare occasions.
Perfect Patios & Sunny Spaces
Work out where you want to sit and eat outside.
Take note of where the sun rises and falls, where there will be full sun all day and where the shade falls at different times.
If your garden is big enough for a small sitting area in the morning for coffee and a larger eating/entertaining area for late afternoon to evening, then mark those out.
The best situation is where you have sun at the beginning and end of the day with a little shade around noon. If your garden is fully south-facing with no shade, plan how to create some with a pergola or well-positioned airy trees like Betula ‘Moonbeam’ or Sorbus aucuparia (Rowans) that will provide dappled shade.
If the builders have already installed a patio, consider whether it’s in the best position for sunlight and practicality. If not, it’s worth moving it before designing the rest of the garden.
Invest in the best garden furniture that you can afford, which is robust enough to stay out all year and plan where you will keep the cushions in the winter months. – Will you have room indoors or do you need to purchase a cushion box?
Storage
Will you need somewhere to store tools such as a lawnmower, garden forks etc? Decide where a shed will go and how big it needs to be. Placing a shed side-on to the garden rather than face-on, gives you a space to grow plants up against, like an espalier fruit tree.
Do you want a greenhouse for growing seedlings and tomatoes or protecting plants over winter? No matter what size shed or greenhouse you choose you will always fill it!
Plan for the Utilities
Washing lines, compost heaps, water butts, dustbins and outside tap, all need to be considered and these days air source heat pumps too.
Whirligig washing lines are easy to fold down and cover or remove when not in use. They can also fit a surprising amount of laundry in a small space. Wall-mounted retractable lines are also easily tidied away and can act as a badminton net for garden games.
Compost heaps are brilliant for recycling your own green waste and vegetable peelings into a free soil improver, reducing the need to visit the local tip. They are also brilliant for wildlife – you may have seen my compost heap slowworms in previous blogs. They are great for eating slugs and snails.
Unfortunately, compost bins are not the prettiest of garden objects, but a well-placed screen of a tall grass like Calamagrostis can help to hide them.
Air source heat pumps can be disguised with shrubs and hedges but you have to leave enough room for airflow and maintenance access. You can also use a vinyl wrap to help disguise them. Planting directly in front of them is more tricky as they blast out cold air while they are working, which is likely to be damaging to foliage. This will need to be taken into consideration when designing your garden layout and planting.
Boundaries
Most new build gardens are already fenced. Consider whether you would like to create a hedge. In the medium term, the fencing can act as a windbreak allowing a hedge to grow from small plants and establish well. By the time the fence panels come to the end of their life span, you will have an established hedge for your garden, creating privacy and providing habitats for wildlife. Read my blog ‘It’s Time to Hedge Your Bets’ for a discussion of hedging vs fencing.
If you do have fencing, darker fence stains help boundaries recede into the background, making the garden feel larger. Positioning a few taller plants and adding trellis or sturdy wires for climbing plants to grow up makes a huge difference to the feel of the garden. They break up the starkness of the boundary whilst taking up very little space.
Adding height within the garden with a tree or pergola will make it feel bigger and can provide privacy from being overlooked by neighbours. Beware that taller fences around the boundary can make a garden feel smaller and will still not shield you from your neighbours upstairs windows.
Paths & Access
Paths should be easy to navigate and 90cm to 1m wide. This allows for plants to just soften the edge without impeding walking particularly if foliage is wet after rain. Curved paths are a great way to make a small garden feel bigger.
Create paths and put in hard landscaping before preparing your soil or planting, so that you don’t get bogged down every time you go outside. It also means that plants won’t be damaged by the hard landscaping work after you have so carefully planted them. It is much easier to fit plants around patios and paths than it is to fit paths and patios amongst planted borders.
Lawns
Do you need a lawn at all? The size and shape of your garden, along with how you plan to use the space, will determine if a lawn is the right choice. If you need an area for children to play, grass will be useful. In small or awkwardly shaped gardens, a lawn might not be practical and you may not have room to store a mower. Instead consider widening flower borders, increasing patio space or using gravel for a low-maintenance solution.
Skinny borders also make a garden look smaller. The developers of this new property have created a tiny patio that is barely big enough for a table and chairs and the soil border around the edge is barely wide enough to plant in.
Soil
Test your soil by taking samples from about 10 spots around the garden. Dig down a trowel’s depth and take each sample from below that. You need to know what the underlying soil type is, in case the builders added a thin layer of topsoil to level out the plot. Use a pH kit to find out if your soil is acid, alkaline or neutral because this will greatly influence the type of plants you can grow.
Next work out if your soil is chalk, clay, sandy, silt or the best of all – loam.
- Chalky soil will often be pale, full of small flints and often white chunks that can draw on a pavement.
- Clay soil when wet can be rolled into shapes and the surface smoothed to a shiny finish with a wet finger.
- Silty soil when wet usually feels soapy and doesn’t clump easily.
- Sandy soil feels gritty and cannot be moulded into a sausage shape.
- Loam is the gardeners best friend. It is an ideal mixture of soil particles, is well-drained, fertile and easily worked.
The free Soilscapes viewer is a very useful tool for seeing what your most likely soil type comprises and is searchable by postcode:
Whatever your soil type it is likely to need the addition of organic matter to improve it. In new build gardens soil can often be poor quality, compacted by machinery and frequently full of building rubble. If your soil is very poor you can dig it over and remove the rubble or you can create raised beds. Tates Garden Centres stock a wide range of composts and soil conditioners.
Checking drainage is very important as poorly drained soil can severely limit what you can grow and how much you can use the garden after rain.
Raised beds are ideal if your soil is very heavy clay, prone to waterlogging or very acidic or alkaline. They have better drainage and you can fill them with good quality topsoil. The downside of raised beds is that they tend to be very angular and you may prefer softer more curved shapes for your garden.
Choosing Plants Wisely
Once you have considered all of the above points and you have worked out your layout for hard landscaping, where you want to sit and where the washing line will go, you can then think about the kind of planting you want. Do you have a colour theme in mind or a particular style such as a cottage garden, contemporary garden or jungle theme, for example.
If you want interest all year round you will need a mixture of evergreen and deciduous, shrubs and perennials. When choosing plants, start with the canopy layer (trees) and structural plants (focal points and topiary) before working down through smaller shrubs and perennials.
Don’t try doing it all in one go. Visit garden centres regularly throughout the year. If you purchase all your plants in one go, you are likely to have a garden that only looks its best at that time of year. Space out your purchases over the season or year – not only to spread your budget, but it also helps to ensure that your garden will have something of interest all year round.
Annual seeds and bedding make fantastic cheap gap fillers while your new plants fill out and establish or while you are deciding what you want. In the autumn hit the shops (Tates of course) for packets of spring bulbs that will bring the brightness and colour that will tempt you outside after the winter.
A mix of 100 different plants can feel like a jumble sale. Limit your choices to a key group of plants and repeat them across your garden. For example, repeating lavender, salvia, and ornamental grasses across borders can create a cohesive look, which will bring both colour and cohesion to your space.
Planting
Prepare your soil first. Dig over areas for planting before starting, to break up any compaction and remove rubble. Dig over the whole area/bed not just a small pocket for each plant. Add organic matter/soil conditioner at a rate of at least a bucketful per square metre, across the whole bed. Fork it in, rake it level and allow it to settle.
If you are not going to get around to planting it all straight away. Cover the area with opened out and weighed down empty compost bags, flattened cardboard boxes or mulch to prevent weeds from growing and keep the moisture in.
For the first year you will need to water trees, shrubs and some perennials regularly to help them establish. A bucketful of water once each week for each plant will soak down through the soil to the roots and draw the roots further down and into the soil, making them more resilient to drought. Whereas a light sprinkle every day during dry weather will often evaporate before reaching the roots. This encourages shallow rooting, making plants more prone to drying out and failing.
It is worth remembering that the larger the specimens you plant, the harder you have to work to keep them watered. Trees and larger shrubs will need extra watering for a few years to ensure they establish well.
With a new garden, you may find it easier to set up an automatic irrigation system on a timer. Some drip irrigation systems can be used even during hosepipe bans – but check the regulations first. Irrigation systems that take rainwater from water butts can be used freely.
Front Gardens
For front gardens where parking is required don’t just opt to pave or tarmac the surface. Investigate other options which will soften the hard landscaping and allow rain to soak into the ground naturally rather than run off which can lead to flash flooding.
Bringing It All Together
Designing a garden for a new-build property is an exciting opportunity to create a space tailored to your lifestyle from scratch. By carefully planning the layout, considering practical needs such as seating areas, storage, and access, and selecting plants suited to your soil and conditions, you can build a garden that is both functional and beautiful.
Remember to start with the essentials – hard landscaping, soil preparation, and structural planting, before adding the finer details.
Be patient, gardens take time to establish. Don’t feel pressured to do everything at once. Small, thoughtful steps will lead to a garden that evolves and thrives over time. The fun in gardening is the planning and trying out of plants and flowers to see what works best for your space and for you.
Most importantly, create a space that you will enjoy. Whether it’s a peaceful retreat, a wildlife haven, or a family-friendly play area, your garden should work for you. As it grows, so will your connection to it.
Happy gardening!
By our resident horticultural expert
