Whether you use the back yard as a place to play, take a meal or a nap, build a fort or tend a garden, this secluded outdoor place naturally leads to homespun diversions. Humble as they may be, these simple pleasures, a little peace and the time to enjoy them richly add to our private lives.
As much as any room inside the house, and certainly more than your front yard, a back yard can be a space for self-expression, any way you care to express it. Remember, it`s your back yard.
Don`t be misled into thinking that the tree house your children want so much will ruin the English-cottage-garden look you desire. Back yards are forgiving places. They are places where life happens, not a set piece or a backdrop for an advertisement in a magazine. You`ll have a lot more fun if you relax a little and leave any strict notion of bad taste on the back porch.
The desire to fix up your back yard may become so strong that you resolve to do something about it immediately. Unfortunately, you halt on the next step because you`re not sure what it should be.
The fact is, you have started fixing up your back yard simply by looking at it. The best back yards develop from many hours of this seemingly passive activity, just sitting and imagining how one idea or another might look.
Childhood memories
Virtually everyone can recall an outdoor place that deeply satisfied him or here as a child. It may have been an older neighbor`s flower garden, with dahlias as big as your head, 3-foot marigolds and trailing nasturtiums that nearly covered the paths.
Or it may have been farther afield, like that shady, cool grove of trees at summer camp where cookouts were held.
Any back yard holds the potential to satisfy you in the same way as any early outdoor experience. The first step is to identify clearly what appealed to you.
There`s no need to write down these thoughts and feelings, but it is important to bear them in mind throughout each stage of the process. Trust your instincts and be willing to modify your plan, even if the only reason you can give for doing so is because ”it just doesn`t feel right.”
At this stage in the back-yard planning process we move from past to present. Here are the supplies to assemble: a binder, some 200 sheets of binder paper, scissors, several sharp pencils with good erasers, tape, ruler and a few sheets of standard graph paper.
With these materials and an armful of home and garden magazines, the object is to create your personal back-yard scrapbook. This may sound sophomoric, but it`s the best thing you can do to ensure that your back yard turns out the way you want it.
The scrapbook will be invaluable on trips to the nursery, hardware store or lumberyard, and it will help you avoid disappointments when dealing with contractors, carpenters, bricklayers, masons and landscapers.
So do everyone a favor: Assemble a back-yard scrapbook before the first shovelful of earth is turned.
Sifting for suggestions
Pick a quiet time to go through the magazines, and look at them slowly. Carefully search the corners of each photograph to see whether anything catches your eye. It might be something as simple as the handle on a gate, a piece of outdoor furniture, the shape of a deck or the color of a fence. No detail is insignificant.
Depending on the urgency, the scrapbook can be assembled over a long weekend, over a few months or slowly over the years.
Once you have collected everyone`s ideas, it`s time to make use of that graph paper, as long as you heed two important warnings.
The most creative people can be rendered robotic when faced with a sheet of graph paper. Just because there are little blue squares all over the page in a perfect grid pattern doesn`t mean you aren`t allowed to draw a curve or draw a line in between the printed lines.
If you think you may be subject to the tyranny of graph paper, neutralize its effect by starting the composition of the plan outdoors. Take your back-yard scrapbook to the back yard, along with a few dozen 12-inch wooden stakes, a half-dozen 2-inch by 2-inch by 6-foot wooden stakes (available at any lumberyard), a spool of heavy cotton string (500 feet should do), two long garden hoses, two handfuls of clothespins and a few old bed sheets. An odd list of equipment, to be sure, but it works.
Put your equipment aside for a moment and take a good look at your scrapbook. What have you got? You may have some ideas for fences, a play area for the children, a deck or patio, perhaps a gazebo or arbor, a really great treehouse, an outside eating and cooking area, a lawn laid out with games in mind or even a fountain, swimming pool or spa. Your challenge is to arrange the elements you want in the space available.
Know your yard
To meet this challenge successfully, you should know every corner of your back yard intimately. You may think you know it, but you`d be surprised at how many people are locked into only one viewing position, usually about 6 feet from the back door.
Get acquainted with your yard by walking its perimeter, and I do mean the perimeter: no farther than an arm`s length from the lot line. While you walk, keep looking back at your house.
Is there a spot, somewhere toward the rear or to the side of the yard, where the view of your house is particularly pleasant? Would this be the best place for a small patio?
And is that the perfect, almost horizontal limb on which to hang a swing? How about the area behind the shrubbery and under the tree, in the far corner of the lot? Did you feel a sense of security and diminished scale that reminds you of places you liked to play in as a child? Perhaps this is the spot for a little ”secret garden” for the children. All that`s necessary is a layer of fine bark, perhaps two sawed-off logs to use as table and chairs and a playful adult to lead the way.
Your back yard ”walkabout” may result in some new ideas about where some of the elements you want should go. This is the easiest, not to mention least expensive, time to change your mind, repeatedly, if desired.
The next step is to mock the various elements into position, using the stakes, string and sheets. Any rectilinear feature, such as a deck, patio, swimming pool or sandbox, can be outlined using the stakes and string.
Simply pound the stakes a few inches into the ground and tie the string around the stakes to show the outline. Curved areas, such as lawns and planting beds, are easily outlined using a long garden hose. Adjust the curves in the hose until the shape is pleasing from all angles.
To the person with little or no involvement in your design process, this mockedup back yard will appear a mess. Where someone else sees only a sheet hanging from a line, you see a brick and latticework fence. That garden hose, lying in a curve on the dirt, isn`t just lying there; it`s marking the boundaries of a lush green lawn.
Sharpen your pencil
The best part of this exercise is the three-dimensional quality it gives your emerging plan, something almost impossible to achieve with only pencil and paper, which happens to be the next step.
Leave the stakes, strings, sheets and hoses in place for two days or weeks if necessary. See how the arrangement looks at different times of the day and in different weather. Once you are comfortable with the layout, get out the tape measure, pencils and paper.
Make a rough drawing of the shape of your lot and house. (Please note the term ”rough.” Even those who feel that they simply can`t draw anything should go ahead and ”rough in” a drawing; it has to make sense only to one person-you-at this point.) Use this rough plan to note the actual
measurements.
Start by measuring the outside perimeter of your lot. Next, measure in from the lot lines to the outside walls of your house to establish its position on the lot. After this, start measuring the outlines of your deck, patio, play area, pool and sandbox. To position everything on the plan correctly, you`ll need to measure in from the lot line, just as you did with your house.
Now is the time to indicate the location of the water spigots, electrical outlets and whatever else you think should be taken into consideration.
Once you have the measurements on the rough plan, transfer them to the graph paper. If a single sheet of graph paper is too confining, tape several sheets together to make a larger drawing.
By the time you have the finished plan on paper, you should be confident that it reflects reality rather than an abstract, two-dimensional drawing pulled together at the kitchen table. This, with your back-yard scrapbook, will hold you in good stead as you go about making your plan come to life.
At a time when so many are trying to simplify their lives, one more thing to take care of may be the last thing we think we need. Oddly, though, a back yard is that rare place that gives back far more than it requires.
