Designing your landscape can be one of the most rewarding projects you’ll ever do. It’s also one of the best garden-related things you can do during the long, cold days of winter.

Good gardens don’t just happen; they’re the result of careful planning. As anxious as you’ll be to rush to the garden center, now’s the time to pause and develop a real understanding of your property’s features and how they can be used to create enjoyable outdoor spaces.

Consider doing these steps:

— Base map. A sketch of your yard, showing property lines, the house’s orientation, driveways and paths. Start at the front corner of the house. With a 100-foot tape, measure the distance out to the curb and across to the nearest property line, and draw onto graph paper. A scale of 1 inch equaling 10 feet works well, but pick whatever works for you and stay consistent through the drawing. The larger the grid paper, the easier it will be to write in all your plans and ideas. If you can find it, 18- by 24-inch grid paper is great.

Continue measuring from all corners of the house to the property’s boundaries. Draw an arrow indicating north. Locate doors and windows; gas, electric and cable utilities; trees and shrubs; and any neighbors’ features near the property line that might affect your design, such as large trees, fences or buildings.

— Site analysis. Make a basic inventory of the property’s strengths and weaknesses. A site analysis can be sketched in a single day, but it would be better to record how the area changes throughout the year. Note all significant features like sunny and shady spots, prevailing winds, drainage problems, existing vegetation, good and poor views and all utilities and easements. Make several photocopies of the base map with site analysis notes.

— Preliminary designs. Now use the copies to come up with three or four preliminary designs. Let your imagination run wild with gazebos, vegetable gardens and flowerbeds. For each design draw a bubble diagram roughly indicating the shapes and locations of these features. Exact items and perfect graphics aren’t necessary; just “bubble in” rough ideas.

Do pay attention to your site analysis, however. For example, a vegetable garden needs a flat, open area with lots of sun. Don’t place it under a huge tree. Consider how the elements relate to each other and the house, too. For example, a compost pile should be close to the vegetable garden but out of view. Or a patio shouldn’t get blasting, summer sun without some kind of cover. It’s going to take several tries to fit the odd pieces smoothly into the jigsaw puzzle, but finally a practical plan will emerge.

Look over your preliminary designs and note the features you like from each. Put them all together on a new, more detailed base map while paying attention to that site analysis. It’s critical that the garden’s features all cooperate. Here is where you need accurate dimensions, too. Find the mature spread of that shade tree; measure exactly how long that front walk will be; count the number of shrubs needed for the hedge. You may find you have to make a hybrid of several different ideas to get everything to work together. Above all, consider the mature size of the plants and trees you want to add. Otherwise, you’re setting yourself up for lots of work and expense later.

When you find your perfect design, draw it on a clean base map. As an option, you can color the different features for easier visual reference, then show it to other gardeners or even a professional landscape designer. A fresh set of eyes is an insurance policy that you haven’t overlooked something that could really cost you later.

— Next, work out a budget. Don’t let money limit your creativity, but be realistic. Actual costs might mean a change in the design. But instead of going back to the drawing board, consider building one part of the plan at a time. Figure what you most want and can do immediately and what can wait until next year. You may find you can have it all — but just not all at once. 

Good landscape design isn’t difficult, but it involves a definite process. Planning, patience and looking to the future are characteristics of gardeners, anyway. You’ll be amazed how quickly you can create the landscape of your dreams.

(Adapted from an earlier The Gardener Within column.)

(Joe Lamp’l, host of “Growing a Greener World” on PBS, is a master gardener and author. For more information visit www.joegardener.com. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.shns.com.)

When P. Allen Smith starts planning how to design a garden, he doesn’t think of it as a patch of soil, grass, flowers and shrubbery. He thinks of it as a room in his house.

“What will the floor of your garden room be? In your home, it’s hardwood, but outside, you may want to do turf or gravel. What are the walls? I couldn’t afford brick, so I used hedges with holly. What do the entry ways look like? I used arbors covered with roses,” he said. “What is the focal point? What is the seating? What is the element of fun and whimsy? These are questions we ask ourselves when we are doing interior design. We should ask the same questions in the outdoors, when we’re doing exterior design.”

Smith will bring his unique perspective on garden aesthetics to the Mark Twain House Museum in Hartford on Saturday, Nov. 17, at a daylong seminar, “The Garden Home in All Seasons.” He is the keynote speaker.

Tomasz Anisko, curator of Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania, and Ruth Loiseau of Suffield, who does floral arrangements for the White House, also will give talks at the event, which is sponsored by the Connecticut Horticultural Society.

Smith, who has two shows on CPTV, “Garden Home” and “Garden to Table,” hosts the P. Allen Smith show on radio and has written several books about gardening, said in a phone interview from his Little Rock, Ark., office that late autumn and winter, when the ground is beginning to freeze, is the perfect time to talk about gardening.

“When it’s cold outside, you can be more focused. You can talk about design and begin to think about the space throughout the winter, so you’ll be ready to move in the spring,” he said. “Spring is a distracting time to think about gardening, because you’re out there doing it.

“In the spring, I’m always running around as hard and as fast as I can to get the plants into the ground I can’t think of where the garden is going,” he said. “In winter, you can think of things you might need to move, and you have time to move them. You can mull it over in your head and noodle around on a piece of paper.”

But there still can be work outside to do this time of year. “It’s the holiday season. How can you work outdoors in a creative and stylish way?” he said.

Smith designed his first home-centric garden after he came back from grad school in England. In that country, he is now a certified fellow in the Royal Horticultural Society.

“I don’t know that garden style there is so different from here, but I had the good fortune to see really great examples of garden design, and some of the best of the world are in England,” he said. “They put the emphasis on structure, on the ‘bones’ of the garden.

“I came home realizing that if you create a confined space, an enclosure, you have the opportunity to deal with the space that isn’t overwhelming.”

Included with admission on Saturday are a demonstration of seasonal greenery designs by Woodland Gardens of Manchester, a silent auction, tours of the Twain House and a vendor market, which includes tools, gardening supplies, house plants, holiday decorations, gardening books, antique engravings and lithographs, photographic prints,notecards, pottery, decorative tiles and birdhouses.

“THE GARDEN HOME IN ALL SEASONS” will be at Mark Twain House Museum, 351 Farmington Ave. in Hartford, on Saturday, Nov. 17, from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Admission is $95, $85 for members of the Connecticut Historical Society and the Mark Twain House. A box lunch will be provided. Tickets to a VIP reception with P. Allen Smith will be Friday, Nov. 16, at the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, 77 Forest St. in Hartford, are $40. To buy tickets, call 860-280-3130.

If you were to meet a garden designer at a social function, I’d lay odds you would launch into a discussion of your gardening woes. I know we are supposedly a nation of gardeners, but would you ask an architect for bricklaying advice or an interior designer about vacuuming?

There is a public misconception about garden design that it is about gardening – it isn’t. It’s about design; the manipulation and organisation of three-dimensional space. Plants play a part in this of course, but so too does paving, lighting and drainage systems. So while pretty flowers may contribute in the creation of something beautiful, design involves spatial awareness, a bit of human psychology and, as Steve Jobs once said, “design is how it works”.

But garden design is more complex again; it doesn’t just exist in its own space but needs to make sense of the context of the space; how it relates to buildings and the wider landscape, whether that’s the neighbour’s dominating Leylandii hedge or a far-distant rural view.

How welcome then, that the Society of Garden Designers has launched the SGD Awards, its inaugural awards scheme to reward fine design and increase understanding of the contribution a professional garden designer can make to both public and private spaces.

At the Awards ceremony last Friday, broadcaster, garden designer and host for the evening James Alexander-Sinclair touched playfully on the rivalry between garden designers and landscape architects, saying that the difference between the two is that garden designers make places pretty while landscape designers make it easy to park your car. The reality is, of course, that there is huge overlap between both disciplines and James went on to say that it’s about the creation of “better, more useful and prettier places”.

The Tokachi Millennium Forest, designed by Dan Pearson. Photograph: Syogo Iizumi

We were treated to a whole series of inspirational pictures from winners and finalists, demonstrating better, useful and beautiful places. A tiny back garden in Chelmsford designed by Patricia Fox, scooped the best small garden award for clever planting and beautifully finished hard landscaping, while the 240-hectare Tokachi Millennium Forest designed by Dan Pearson, which won the grand award, the most prestigious award of the night. Dan’s vision for the project has been to engage a largely urban population with the natural environment and it was described by the judges as “extraordinarily skilful and appeared completely effortless and natural”.

Amberd Lodge, Somerset, designed by Amanda Patton, who won the planting design award at the SGD Awards. Photograph: Amanda Patton

It’s a great feeling to be judged by one’s peers (and I know as I received the planting design award that night) who aren’t seduced by the superficially pretty and who took the time to visit many of the shortlisted gardens and talked to the owners. This designer/client relationship is often undervalued, but is critical in making the difference between a good garden and a truly great one.

In the case of Ian Kitson, (who took the coveted judges’ award in addition to the hard landscaping and best medium residential garden awards), the judges congratulated his clients in allowing him free reign to create what they described as a spectacular garden at Follers Manor in East Sussex. It was a bold and brave design, and without a good relationship with the clients, the comment “I’d like to use lots of crazy paving” might just have been the point where the client/designer relationship broke down!

As for the ceremony itself, the event was peppered with people from all sides of the profession, including designer and broadcaster Joe Swift, himself a fully registered member of the Society, and Andy Sturgeon, a fellow of the society; multinational nurseries and plant specialists, specialist stone suppliers, artists and craftsmen, teachers and students and a lot of people, like myself, who have the pleasure of being able to design a little beauty into people’s lives – that, and giving them somewhere to park the car.

• Amanda Patton is a Sussex-based garden designer and a member of the Society of Garden Designers