How to Design Your Dream Garden from Scratch (Step by Step!)

Want a beautiful garden? I’ve got you!❤️🌿 Get my FREE Garden Guide Here! 👉 https://ashleychildershome.myflodesk.com/2025-garden-guide

💕 Join my NEW Design Masterclass HERE! 👉 https://ashleychildershome.com/interior-design-course

🎨 Get my FREE Paint Guide HERE! ➡️ https://ashleychildershome.myflodesk.com/2025paintguide

💬 Send me your Design Questions to get answered in an upcoming YouTube video HERE 👉 design@ashleychilders.com

✨ Get the FREE Decorating Cheat-Sheet HERE! ➡️ https://ashleychildershome.myflodesk.com/magazine-worthy-decor

💡Check out our FREE Lighting Guide HERE! ➡️
https://ashleychildershome.myflodesk.com/lighting-guide

*LIKE THIS VIDEO AND SUBSCRIBE FOR WEEKLY DESIGN GOODNESS!*

Video Chapters:
00:00 – Intro
00:57 – My Best Tips for Designing Your Garden
19:46 – Thanks for Watching!

===================================

✨ SHOP the Collection: Designed by Ashley ✨
https://ashleychilders.com/

✨ SHOP Ashley’s Amazon Favorites! ✨
https://www.amazon.com/shop/ashleychildershome

✨ Get Inspiration and Designer Tips on the Blog! ✨
https://ashleychildershome.com/

====================================
Connect with us! ❤️
====================================
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ashleychildershome/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ashleychildershome/
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/ashleychildersco/_saved/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ashleychilders
Shop: https://ashleychilders.com/
Blog: https://ashleychildershome.com/

In this video, I’m taking you step-by-step through the entire garden design process so you can create the outdoor space you’ve been dreaming of!🌿✨

We’ll cover everything from setting your garden goals and style vision, to choosing materials, planning your layout, installing irrigation, lighting, and of course—selecting the perfect plants, and potted arrangements. I’ll also walk you through how we tackled the construction phase of our own garden—from building retaining walls and raised beds to laying pea gravel and creating cozy zones for relaxing and entertaining.

💡 PLUS! I’m finally sharing the exact custom paint colors I used on our home’s exterior brick, shutters, and fencing. I get questions about these every single week—and today, I’m spilling all the details.

📝 DOWNLOAD THE FREE GARDEN GUIDE 👉 https://ashleychildershome.myflodesk.com/2025-garden-guide

It’s packed with:
– My custom exterior paint color codes

– Favorite seed and plant suppliers

– Go-to gardening tools and essentials

– Tips for planning, mapping, and building your dream garden

Whether you’re dreaming of a cottage garden, English-style landscape, or just want to bring a little magic to your backyard—this guide will help you plan it all with confidence.

In this garden design video, you’ll learn:
– How to design a garden from scratch (start to finish)
– How to set a garden vision and must-have list
– How to assess your sun exposure, soil type & climate
– Hardscape materials & layout planning tips
– Garden construction phases & budgeting advice
– Irrigation systems & outdoor lighting ideas
– Foundation planting + perennials & annuals

Ready to design your dream garden? Let’s do this together!
#GardenDesign #BackyardMakeover #CottageGarden #OutdoorLiving #AshleyChilders #ExteriorPaintColors #EnglishGarden

Music: Epidemic Music

Work with us: social@ashleychilders.com

well you may not be as obsessed about garden design as I am but chances are you have either visited a friend’s house with a garden that you fell in love with or you’ve seen a gorgeous garden online and thought “How the heck does someone create that from scratch?” Well today I am pulling back the leafy curtain and I’m going to show you how to create a garden design plan from inspiration to reality and as a bonus I am answering one of the most asked the most asked design questions I get about my house and that is what is my exterior brick paint color and what is my trim color they’re custom colors that I had formulated when we built the house i’ve never shared them before but because you have asked so graciously I’m sharing them later in today’s video so be sure to stick around for that now let’s get to designing your glorious garden okay so the very first thing that we do when we’re creating a garden design is set our overall vision that we want for the garden the style that we want for the garden and our goals and our musthaves so this is the exact same process that we go through when we’re designing an interior space and so obviously we want to go through that entire process when we’re designing our outdoor spaces as well so setting the vision for your garden for me my number one goal for my garden was to be able to cut flowers and bring them into my house that was the number one goal i set that from the very beginning and the style that I wanted for our garden was something that mimicked that kind of abundant overgrown quality of English country gardens like in the Cotswwells i fell in love with all the gardens when we went and visited them so that’s what I wanted to recreate in my humid Arkansas garden um so keeping those things top of mind as I laid out the plan for all of the flower beds and what I wanted to include and all the plant materials and that kind of stuff was really essential because it helped guide all the decisions that I made and how I laid everything out so that’s the first and foremost most important thing to do must haves that’s another part of setting that overall vision and goals so I knew that I wanted to have as many cut flower plants as possible but I also wanted to have some really great foundational planting that was evergreen so I’ve got a lot of boxwoods in the garden i wanted that structure throughout the entire year so that was important to me having that balance between like the overgrown wispiness of the cut flowers and then also having the evergreen structure of the boxwoods and some of the larger plants and and trees that are in the garden so for you that might look totally different your vision might look different you want might want something that’s a little bit more manicured you might not want to deal with cut flowers it might be you know all succulents or whatever but you really need to think about what you want out of your garden i wanted a place to be able to relax i wanted a place that felt inspirational for me a place that I could connect with nature and honestly spend some quiet time if I wanted to you know do a some journaling or something like that a lot of times I come out into the garden in the morning have my cup of coffee and just have a moment to like to myself to chill out before my workday starts so that might be something you want in your garden or it might not be but really get clear on how you want your garden to work for you because if you do everything else that you do throughout the design process is going to be easier and it’s going to give you a better outcome [Music] okay now that we’ve got our vision set and our goals and our must haves and all that stuff the next thing that we need to do is take an assessment of our existing conditions so we do this in a house as well we look at the interior architecture we look at the things that we can’t change and when we’re thinking about garden design the things that we can’t change are our soil i mean we can amend it but you need to know what type of soil you have we have clay soil here so I knew that in order to get an abundance of cut flowers I was going to need raised beds so I could amend the soil in the raised beds and then we also amended all the soil in the perimeter beds so that I could grow the plants I wanted to grow in the best conditions possible here in Arkansas so that’s something you need to think about you need to think about your weather conditions because not all gorgeous cut flowers grow in all the different places in the United States or in the world even so think about that think about what type of irrigation options you have we absolutely have to have irrigation here in the south and so I knew that in order to get an abundance of flowers the way that I wanted to I was going to need to add drip irrigation because our normal like sprinkler irrigation would have just like beat my flowers to death so I needed to add drip irrigation so all of those existing conditions played into the way that I designed the garden and some of the elements that I brought into the space in order to have the type of garden I wanted and to meet my gardening goals okay so you’ve got your design plan you’ve got your pre-existing conditions you’ve thought about the environment that you’re creating for your plants and you’ve started thinking through the plants that would work best in your garden because we want to make sure that everything thrives and you don’t get frustrated that’s kind of a part of gardening i get frustrated from year to year because I plant things and sometimes they don’t always work but you know our gardens humble us like that so the next phase of the garden design process is thinking through the layout and the hard surface materials that you want to include in your garden so for me I knew that I wanted to repeat some of the elements that were on our house and in our existing landscape so that was the painted brick which here is the custom formula for the painted brick and it is all of the cedar elements that I’ve stained on our house so we have cedar shutters all of our fencing is cedar and then cedar posts on our porch and we actually have tongue and groove on the ceiling of our porch as well that’s all cedar and it’s all stained a custom color which is right here now don’t forget I’m going to include these in the garden guide i have created an entire garden guide for you it’s got all of my favorite uh seed resources gardening musthaves all of the things that I use every single year in my garden i created a comprehensive list all the links are there for you in the garden guide plus the formulas for my paint and you can download it below the video okay you’re welcome for that all right now thinking through the hard surface material so I wanted to repeat the brick painted brick i wanted to repeat the cedar and I wanted to make sure that I included natural stone in my garden somehow so all of our perimeter beds are edged in a really beautiful natural blue stone now another thing that I used that stain color on was our cedar raised beds we have six of them in the garden and I’m going to put the link in the description i think they’re from Earth Easy if I can remember correctly they were pre-made and then we just put them together but we stained them all the same color that we used on all the rest of the cedar elements on our house and I love the way it turned out because it just created that continuity in the garden they would have been beautiful if I would have kept them cedar just like raw cedar but I like how they it ties everything together because they’re stained the same color as the fence and all of the shutters and all that stuff now another thing I know I wanted to include was pearavevel so all of our pathways and everything are pearavevel in the garden and I love it for a couple of reasons first of all it’s permeable and all the rain water is able to soak into the ground and run off and not be like this hard surface concrete material or paved material that’s quite honestly not that great for the environment and I just love the way it crunches under my feet too so if you get an opportunity to include some pig gravel into your garland garden I highly recommend it um one last little thing on the pig gravel is that you know I like that abundant cotwalts look and I just love that all of the little like runners and ground cover kind of spill out into the pearl i think it’s super cute all right so we’ve got that phase done we have decided what materials we want to use we’ve thought through the layout of the garden that is really really important and looked at the amount of space that you’re working with so we had a pretty large space to work with but honestly in comparison to the to the property we have 5 acres so yes this seems pretty big but it’s not compared to the property i wish I would have made it larger i’m actually working on extending the garden hopefully next year that will be a new project for 2026 um I’ll of course bring you along but it’s a pretty large space and when I mapped it all out when I drew everything out I just did it in my trusty garden journal on graph paper okay this does not have to be complicated you can use an online like design software if you want but look this is how I did my entire garden okay it’s just little graph paper everything’s to scale i’ve got all of the plants listed out when I change things out from year to year i make little notes and I keep this garden journal with me all the time so I can reference it very easily i don’t have to get my computer out to look at some like you know online design software where I’ve created a garden uh layout you can do that if you want but you don’t have to easy and simple wins every single day okay the last little detail I want to talk about when you’re planning your layout is to think through the exterior lighting elements you want to include so we’ve got some landscape lighting in the garden that some up lighting i love up lighting it gives so much drama at night but we also have string lights because they were a must have for me i wanted that like Parisian vibe in our garden and so string lights were a must and I planned that from the very beginning of the garden layout because I knew that I wanted to make a zigzag pattern with the string lights and in order to do that my fence posts that extend to the pergola needed to fall in between the posts on my patio okay so we’ve got this covered patio and in order to get a symmetrical zigzag pattern with my string lights I had to make sure that when we created the fence the post lined up in between so everything’s symmetrical it took a little bit of like pre-planning and slight math but I’m so glad that I took the time to lay it out like this because the the whole Oh that was a bug sorry um anyways the whole like result is absolutely gorgeous we have these string lights on every single night of the year so they play a huge role in the ambiance of the garden as far as the raised beds and the perimeter beds go I made sure to maximize the entire space so we have large walkways down the center that connect this side of the garden to the other side of the garden through the patio and then in between the raised beds and the perimeter beds I made sure that I had roughly about 3 ft 3 ft is a really great clearance space for interiors i mean I usually like to go up to 4T when I’m talking about like a hallway or something but you know for cabinetry and stuff like that 3 ft’s a minimum so I felt like that would be a good minimum for my pathways in the garden and honestly it is it works out great if my flowers get a little bit leggy and a little bit abundant or kind of reaching over the edges of my raised beds or my perimeter beds it doesn’t matter because 3 ft still feels like there’s enough room to move around and to bring my little garden trolley down all of the different pathways as I’m like weeding and stuff like that so that was step number three thinking through all the materials that we want to use thinking through the layout that we want to have thinking through if we want to include some type of lighting element in our gardens now the next phase is the actual construction phase of your project and you may be doing it DIY style absolutely totally down with that or you may be hiring somebody we actually did a combination my husband did a ton of the work himself because he knows how to run some of the like large like front loader and equipment like that so he compressed a lot of the ground for me we did have a crew that came in and of course framed the patio built the patio did all of the stone work did the retaining walls you definitely want to have a professional do your retaining walls but it was a combination effort and honestly we did the majority of the planting i would say 95% of the plants that are in our garden my husband and I planted ourselves because we’re very particular about the planting we want to make sure everything’s planted exact way that it needs to be for that particular species of plants so we love to do that ourselves okay now once your construction phase is over regardless if you’re doing it yourself or you’re hiring somebody you’ve got the groundwork of your garden laid with your infrastructure of your stonework your hardscapes your you know lighting if you’re doing that any type of irrigation needs that you have then it’s time to start planting so I have a combination of both shrubs that are evergreen i’ve got a lot of boxwoods i’ve got limelight hydrangeas i’ve got oakleaf hydrangeas and I’ve got a ton ton ton of perennials now one thing that I have realized through the past 3 years of having this garden is that for me it is more rewarding to plant perennials i did a ton of annuals like the first year and honestly you know they’re like a one-hit wonder and if I’m going to spend money on plants I’d like for them to like you know give back to me year after year so I’ve got mostly perennials in my garden now there was some absolute musthaves when it comes to plant material i knew I wanted wisteria so I’ve got wisteria going up and over all of the posts on the patio i knew that I for sure wanted obviously English roses hello i was creating an English country garden i had to have English roses so I’ve got a ton of David Austin roses in the garden and I love that they uh bloom multiple times throughout the summer i had to have Dalia they’re my favorite flower is do I have the best climate for them absolutely not it’s hot and it’s humid and they get a little sad uh at the heat of the day in July and August but they’re so worth the effort they bring me blooms all summer long into fall honestly they’ll bloom for us like all the way through October because it’s pretty warm here in the fall so those are the plants that just keep on giving the tubers multiply underground we can dig them up plant them back out and I have a small little um collection of everexpanding dalas now some other things I wanted i’ve got some pianies in here i’ve got really pretty viburnum trees i’ve got some viburnum bushes i will say that the first summer that I had the garden I did plant some vegetables and last summer I did um I did tomatoes I did okra uh maybe some cucumbers if I remember correctly and I’m going to be honest it wasn’t my favorite thing you may want to do vegetables in your garden you may want your whole garden to be vegetables but for me it just took up spots that my flowers could have been so I have whittleled my vegetables down to I’ve well I’ve got some strawberries this year so fruit and then I’ve got um mainly herbs because we do use the herbs i mean I’ve got I’ve got all the herbs which I love um but I just didn’t need to take up a whole entire raised bed cuz I only have six of them i didn’t need to have okra i’ll just buy my okra at the farmers market and support the local farmers so as you’re designing your garden as you’re thinking through your garden think about the plant materials that you want to use and I would say do your research it’s kind of one of the most fun things to me about designing a garden uh is just to like dig into what plants work well in your environment uh what native plants can you bring in to support pollinators that’s a really big thing for us we make sure that we have plants that are native to Arkansas and that our pollinators will love a lot of you already know that we have honeybees so we want to make sure to create a garden that not only looks beautiful for me and has great flowers that I can cut and bring inside but also that support our honeybees that are right bes like right behind our garden they’re in here every single day buzzing around and doing some gardening with me now the last thing that I will say that I really am glad that I did when I was thinking through the garden design is I made sure to have a spot in the garden for my container plants so I’ve got about I’m kind of ashamed to say but also a little proud of myself i’ve got about 45 to 50 containers back here and one of the things let me take you over here one of the things that I love to do and I think it’s just a really great way to if you don’t have a big garden space this is a great way to add a lot of visual interest into your garden is with container islands so this is like I don’t know a lot there’s probably like seven eight nine containers right here in the center and I’ve grouped them all together and the plants kind of intermingle with each other and it just looks like one big plant installation the same thing goes for these containers on my steps like this is actually this is like seven containers right here but the patunias kind of spill out in this wave and grow and ramble over some of the other plant material and it honestly I’m obsessed with how it looks i think it looks so good i love it now of course we’re midsummer i don’t know how this is going to look come like the end of August but right now it looks great and I’m absolutely obsessed with it so that’s a takeaway for you if you’re you know planning out your garden or if you just don’t even have a large space you can always add some containers to even a patio on your you know at your apartment or outside your front door and create a little gardening moment in a space that may be smaller than what I have here i hope that me sharing my garden design process with you helps inspire you to create something beautiful outdoors for yourself this year i can attest that my garden is my happy place it’s my favorite place in the whole wide world it’s what centers me it’s what keeps me hopeful and in touch with the seasonal shifts outside of my windows and it’s a place that I feel like I can just truly be myself and I want that for you as well now don’t forget that I created the garden guide for you with the exterior paint colors that I know you want to know you can download it below and if you want some more garden inspiration and a full tour of my garden I want you to meet me in this next video i’ll see you there