The Step-by-Step Approach
Stand with your back to the house and look over the land. Arrange for an open space next to the house. This will give a feeling of light and freedom.
If possible, plan so that you can’t see all the garden at once. A clump of flowering shrubs, or trees perhaps, lend an air of interest and mystery. At first sight, who knows what lies beyond? Arrange for a terrace to link home and garden. It makes an ideal place to sit, and at the same time protects the foundations of the house from the water that the grass will need.
In a small garden, soften the all-too-visible boundaries. A hedge instead of a wall avoids that “don’t fence me in” feeling. Think of privacy. In a large garden this may cause no problem, but you might like to plant a hedge or bushes to screen the swimming pool from the approach to the front door for instance, or there may be a distant eyesore such as a tall block of flats that can easily be masked by a strategically placed and quick-growing tree. Sometimes an attractive, distant view is brought more sharply into focus by a frame of foliage.
In a smaller garden, privacy is of even greater importance. A trellis attached to the fence and covered with quick-growing climbers can provide a floral screen. If the garden is near a busy road, edge it with trees. Very many trees in Spain keep their leaves all the year, and cutout a surprising amount of dust and glare.
Plan your paths to see that they go where you need them. Unless you wish for rigidly classical lines, you may want to curve your paths rather than make them ruler straight. As the artists say: “Curved is the line of beauty.” If it seems naturally right in the circumstances that a path should be straight, the effect can be softened by flowers growing nearby.
If the ground slopes away from the house, put bright bushes rather than a low flower bed in the distance. They can be seen the moment you enter the garden.
In a new garden, decide whether you would like to put down an infrastructure of underground water pipes before you make the lawn. Whether it is to be a sophisticated drip system of underground irrigation or a simpler system of water pipes to service a hose and sprinklers, do it now.
Finally plan storage for your equipment. A mower and tools to give of their best must have a fit place to live.
Soil
Most gardens in Spain have good soil. Take care to keep it good and to improve it where necessary.
Occasionally villas are built on beautiful hillsides where the soil is inadequate for producing fine flowers. In this case, buy soil from a local nursery garden or, in a small area, make a garden entirely in planters ifiled with any mixture you need.
When budgeting for your garden, place farm manure high on your list of priorities. It is not cheap, but can be obtained from nursery gardens, and is more worthwhile than many showy garden luxuries.
Farm manure not only feeds plants but alters the nature of the soil, making it not only richer, but also more open and friable and so more easily penetrated by growing roots. Never use farm manure until it is well rotted. It increases the actual bulk of the soil, unlike chemical fertilizers which nourish and stimulate plants without altering the texture of the earth.
Compost
Save fallen leaves, lawn cuttings (except for the first cutting after the application of weed-kifier) and all soft garden refuse to enrich the land that grew them. There are many schools of thought as to how best to treat this waste vegetable matter, but all agree that both moisture and air are needed to make good compost.
Some gardeners buy special bins with air inlets in the sides. These, with the use of a proprietary accelerator are probably the fastest way of getting the desired result.
Others erect a circular bin of wire netting and fill it with their garden refuse. Others, and often the most experienced, dig a shallow hole in the ground, a little under a metre in diameter, then build up their compost heap until it stands half a metre high or a little more, seeing that it is always damp. When one heap is built, another is started, and so on, according to the produce of the garden. This is not the quickest, but certainly an easy way of making good humus. With or without chemical additives, good, rich compost is produced in a year, and in far less time a rich, treacly-brown mulch is available which is excellent for helping plants and suppressing weeds in herbacious borders.
Never put thick, woody stems or virulent weeds on to the compost heap. It is better to burn them.