COMMON GARDEN DESIGN MISTAKES
(AND HOW TO AVOID THEM)

Most garden design mistakes aren't about individual taste or style. They're about sequencing — doing things in the wrong order, or letting loose with the fun stuff before you've got the boring foundations firmly in place.

Designers see the same handful of mistakes on repeat, and none of them are really about someone having bad taste or enjoying the odd garden gnome. They're structural and 100% fixable, if you catch them early. Expensive, if you don't. And they tend to cluster around a few decisions made too early, or in the wrong order, before anyone's actually looked hard at the site itself.

Catching them before they're paid for and delivered is exactly what a proper full garden design process is for.

1. Buying plants first

The classic one: buying plants first. You see something that catches your eye at the garden centre on a sunny Saturday, bring it home, and only later work out it wants full sun and you've got a shady strip against a fence. Nice plant. Wrong garden. I've been called into gardens where someone's spent decent money on a beautiful specimen, only for it to need moving eighteen months later because nobody checked what was going on with the soil, or how much shade the house itself gives once autumn comes round and the sun sits lower in the sky. The site needs to decide the plants, not the other way round — and that's true whether you're spending fifty quid or a grand.

2. Not dealing with the ground first

Second up: not dealing with the ground first. Drainage, soil type, where the shade actually falls at 4pm in July versus 4pm in January — none of it's glamorous, all of it decides whether anything you plant later actually doesn't just look more and more miserable until it dies. A bed that looks fine in a dry spell can turn into a swamp the first proper wet winter, simply because nobody worked out where the water was going before anything went in the ground. Skip this bit and you're not designing a garden, you're gambling on one, and hoping the weather's kind enough not to expose you as a mug.

3. Designing for the photograph, not your life

Third: designing for the photograph, not your actual life. A garden that looks incredible in June and is unusable the other eleven months isn't a design, it's a set piece perfectly tailored for the 'Gram. I've seen beautifully styled seating areas nobody actually sits in, because they face the wrong way for the evening sun, or there's nowhere sensible to put a cup of tea down. Somewhere to actually sit with a coffee, hang washing out, let a dog or a toddler loose without a casualty — that's the bit that gets skipped when the priority is how it'll look on the day it's finished, rather than how it'll be used every day after that.

4. Getting the structure wrong before the planting

Fourth: getting the boundaries and structure wrong before touching a single flower. Hard landscaping, levels, where paths actually need to go based on how you move through the space — get this wrong and no amount of planting fixes it. A path added as an afterthought, once the patio's already down, almost always ends up going the wrong way. You can watch people ignore it entirely and cut straight across the lawn instead, which tells you everything about whether the original layout was ever right. It's the framework. Everything else hangs off it.

5. Not being honest about maintenance

Fifth, the quiet one: not being honest about maintenance. A border full of fireworks looks incredible on Pinterest and takes four hours a week to keep looking like that. If that's not you, design for the garden you'll actually keep up with, not the one you'd like to be the kind of person who keeps up with it. I'd rather build something a little simpler that still looks good in August of year three, than something spectacular that's a jungle by then because life, as is very often the case, got in the way.

6. Not thinking about how the garden's used across the day

And sixth: not thinking about how the garden's actually used across the day, not just how it looks from the kitchen window. A breakfast spot that's in shade until 11am, or a dining area that's baking in direct sun at 6pm in July — these get built constantly, because the layout was decided on a nice-looking plan rather than by watching where the sun actually falls through a real day, in real weather, at the times you'd actually want to be outside.

The common thread through all of this is sequencing — site first, structure second, planting third, prettiness last. Get that order right and most of the expensive mistakes never happen in the first place.