Following on from the previous post on surveying the topography of your garden, we are now going to look at a simple, but effective, method of surveying you gardens existing features so that you can plan any additions or plot a record of what is there on a piece of paper.
Start by roughly dissecting your garden as shown with the long pink line. Put a wooden peg into the ground at each end (in the case of a patio you will have to tie it to a chair or heavy object.
It does not have to be parallel to anything but we are going to project off of this at right angles so take the easiest route possible.
Now tie a small piece of string or electricians tape at regular known intervals i.e. 50cm or 100cm.
Now simply measure across from your line, maintaining a right angle, until the tape touches an object or boundary. Reproduce all of these dimensions on your paper and fill it in like dot to dot and you will have a simple plan.
The next step up from this is triangulation. Triangulation allows you to pin point an object or a given point accurately without having to use a long line as a dissection.
Using the example in light blue on the Paint doc, you can see I have used the corner of the patio as point a) and the other as point b). By measuring from each point to the object - in this case the lower end of the oval border - I can accurately place the given point.
Once I transfer these two measurements to paper, I simple have to draw a feint pencil line with a compass to scale, from points a) and b) and where they intersect will be the point on the border which I can then plot.
Using these two simple methods, it is then easy to survey a garden quite easily.
click on the illustration to enlarge it.
Simple Garden Surveying - Part One
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