How to draw up your Site Survey and Analysis Plan.

Welcome back!

How did you get on with that jigsaw? Or did you take one look at it and panic like I did? Either way, I hope you had a good weekend.

Today, we're going to look at all of the measured and non-measured information that you've got from your garden, and we're going to draw it up in to our Survey and Site analysis Plan. Finally!

Don't panic! It's not that bad! Just a little time consuming, depending on how good you are a technical drawing.

The first thing you need to do is to decide what size scale you need to use. As mentioned before this will be based largely on how large your garden is. If your garden is huge - you lucky things- then you will probably have to use a scale of 1:200, but this is best avoided as you will not be able to add much detail and will be quite hard to draw.

For those of us with normal sized gardens, and those that are the size of a postage stamp, I'd recommend using a scale of 1:100 or 1:50. Whichever scale you chose though, you will need to measure the longest widths and lengths onto your paper to make sure that they fit. Not only do your longest measurements need to fit, but you will need to have ample room around your drawing to be able to make comments. If you try to crowd it into small gaps it will look muddled and confusing, and you probably won't have a clue what you were talking about when you come to use your plan. You will also need to decide the best angle for your piece of paper - horizontal (landscape) or vertical (portrait) - to allow for your drawing. It is usually best to try placing your building at the bottom of the page and working up from that.

Remember to mark on your plan what scale you are using and which way north faces.

For this to work you will need:

Tracing paper
Masking Tape
Smooth 'underlay' paper
Scale ruler
Retractable pencil (0.5mm lead)
T-Square
Adjustable set square
Beam Compass
Drawing Board (optional)

Using the masking tape, secure your underlay paper to the table top or the drawing board. You could use graph paper for this which will give you some sense of scale but it is worth remembering that very few, if any, of your measurements will exactly fit this. Next secure your chosen size of tracing paper over the underlay paper making sure that you can see the lines of the graph paper through it. You must ensure that any vertical or horizontal lines that or are draw on the plan are true and square. Otherwise you will end up with many errors and the plan will be inaccurate and meaningless.

The first line to draw will be your baseline of the house. Draw it in exactly the same direction that you took the original measurement. Next you will need to plot your boundary corners and draw in the lines to your boundary.

To plot your corners, refer to your triangulation notes. Use your scale rule to adjust your beam compass to correspond with your first measurement from, the fixed point at the house to the boundary corner. Now place the 'spiked' end of the beam compass at the location of the fixed point of the house on the drawing, and, using your best guesstimate, hold the pencil end of the compass in the area you believe the boundary corner to be. Then, when you're fairly happy with the position, scribe an arc in that area. Repeat this process with your second triangulation measurement (probably from the other fixed point on your baseline). Where the two arcs meet - that is the actual position of your boundary corner.

Easy, huh?

Continue this process for each point that you have triangulated in the survey. Once you have your boundary plotted, you can then continue to fill in the rest of the drawing. Plot everything that you measured on-site and write information around the edges to complete the analysis. (See Diagram Below)
For features that you measured using the 'offset' method, you will need to plot them onto your drawing in exactly the same method - plot the baseline you used and measure from each point along it, just as you did in the garden.


If measurements are not adding up now that you are putting them onto paper, you probably made an error in the recording stage and will need to re-measure. Don't beat yourself up over it. Simply pop back out to the garden and re-measure - problem solved!

Take as much care with drawing as you did with the measuring. Your plan needs to be as accurate as humanly possible.

And that's all there is to it! It's fairly simple - it's just really time consuming!

Taking a separate piece of paper, you will need to draw up elevation drawings to accompany your Site Survey Plan. Work through your measurements in the same order that you took them, starting from the baseline. Add written information to relate to features along the house front (or whatever the subject of the elevation is) onto your new elevation plan. I'll go into elevation drawings at a later date so don't worry if you can't get the hang of it yet.

The important thing at the end of this stage is that you know exactly what exists in your garden and have an accurate drawing, or drawings, recording that information.

If you're satisfied that you have done all of that -Well Done!. You are now on your way to becoming a garden designer!

The next thing we'll look at, is trying to decide what you might like in your newly-designed garden.