Why we draw the garden in section before we plant it
A plan tells you where things go. A section tells you how tall they get, how deep they root, and whether they will still be there in year three.
Most garden design happens in plan — looking down, moving shapes around on paper. Plan is where you decide where a bed goes and how a path curves. But a border is not a shape on the ground. It is a stack of layers, and the layers live in the one drawing plan cannot show you: the section.
What a section is
A section is the garden cut through and seen from the side. It shows the datum — the finished ground level everything is measured from — and, above and below it, where each layer sits: the canopy at the top, then the understorey, the shrub layer, the herbaceous layer, and the groundcover on the floor. Below the datum it shows the other half nobody photographs: the root depths, the topsoil, the drainage.
Drawn to one scale, it answers the questions a plan cannot. Will the canopy tree shade out the border you have put under it? Do three of your five layers all root in the same 300 mm of soil and then compete? Is there enough depth of good soil for any of it? You can see all of that in a section, and you can price it.
A one-layer garden
The commonest fault we are called to is not a dead plant. It is a border with only one storey — a row of the same shrub, or a bed of bedding — that is bare or dull for most of the year because nothing else is holding the space above or below it. It was designed in plan and never drawn in section, so the layers were never there to begin with.
The layers, top to bottom
A designed planting borrows its structure from a wood, where the same ground grows plants at five or six different heights at once:
- Canopy — the height and the winter structure. Multi-stem trees, set first.
- Understorey — the layer read at eye level.
- Shrub layer — massed for cover and the bulk of the body.
- Herbaceous — the flowering months, cut back each spring.
- Groundcover and bulbs — the floor that suppresses the weeds.
Because the layers occupy different heights and different root depths, they share the bed without fighting over it. Something is doing the work in every month, and when one layer is cut back or dormant another is holding the space. That is the difference between a planting plan and a garden.
We build it in the same order we draw it
The section is not just a design tool — it is the build sequence. On site the garden goes in from the bottom of the drawing up: reduced level and drainage first, then topsoil, then the planting biggest-first while the beds are still open to a barrow, and mulch last. The drawing on our home page assembles in exactly that order, because that is the order the ground is actually built.
Bring us the plot
We will survey the ground, draw it in section, and give you a planting plan and a costed schedule you can build to — with us or with anyone.