Planting design workshop

Your Course

Create Beautiful, Functional Planting Plans for Your Garden

This two-day workshop is perfect for gardeners, garden designers, or enthusiastic amateurs who want to deepen their understanding of planting design. Whether you’re designing a new border, rejuvenating an existing space, or working on a full garden scheme, this course will help you create planting plans that are not only beautiful but also practical and sustainable.

What You’ll Learn:

· Principles of good planting design: structure, form, texture, colour, and seasonal interest

· How to analyse your site conditions and choose appropriate plants

· Techniques for combining plants to achieve visual harmony and year-round impact

· How to develop layered planting schemes that work with your garden layout

· How to create and draw up a planting plan, including plant spacing and quantities

Course Format: Through a mix of illustrated lectures, hands-on exercises, group discussion, and individual guidance, you’ll build the confidence to develop your own planting schemes. You’ll leave the course with a planting plan tailored to your garden or project, along with the skills to repeat the process on future designs.

Who It’s For: Ideal for those with a basic understanding of gardening or design who want to focus specifically on planting. No prior design experience is required—just a passion for plants and creativity.

Course materials and requirements

Each student must bring a SCALED SURVEY DRAWING of the area that you wish to plant.

Please bring – a notebook/sketchbook, pens, mechanical pencil, coloured pencils, a scale ruler, a set square, circle guide and eraser.

Please bring some photos of your garden, also a soil sample to test (this only needs to be a very small amount of soil in a plastic bag). We will have soil testing kits.

There will be some items including notebooks available to buy from the shop.

Key Information

• Suitable for: Beginngers
• Timings: 2-Day masterclass from 10am – 4.30pm
• Catering: A light lunch and refreshments will be provided each day.  Please specify any dietary requirements at time of booking.
• Venue: The Waldron Gallery & Studio, TN21 0RA
• Essential materials to bring Notebook, Layout pad, Sketching Pencils,          Self-propelling pencil, Eraser, Set Square, Scale ruler, Masking tape/scotch tape, Circle guide, Camera, Scissors, Fine liner – eg Staedtler thickness 0.05 – 0.3 – 0.5 – 0.1 (all are good), Tracing paper – pad or roll is more economical, Sketch book – several sizes is good, Colouring pencils, French Curves, Compass
• Non-essential but useful: Tape measure (long 30m tape and short 5m tape), Beam compass,Erasing shield