KEY POINTS:
Creating pleasant outdoor living areas is as much an act of nature as of man.
Trees, shrubs and vines work with decking, paving and fencing to convert the most pedestrian of backyards to an outdoors that could come straight from the pages of a magazine such as NZ House & Garden.
You need a little planning to create a green and peaceful exterior space. Unlike a section of fence, a vine-hung arbour wasn't built in a day.
But you needn't spend a lot on plants because most climbers and many perennials and shrubs grow from cuttings out of the gardens of neighbours and friends.
Donations of this kind are a more affordable way to establish a garden than simply buying up large, and you can save your money for special feature plants.
By sorting out what you like in a friend's garden, you get to see at first hand exactly what kind of conditions suit the plant best and can give it a very good chance of survival.
When you take a cutting, check out its habits. If it thrives in damp and shady conditions, find or create the same sort of space on your new section. Likewise, if a plant is doing well in hot, dry sunny conditions, don't plant it under a deck and expect it to go wild. It won't.
Ask how old each plant is. At two years old and 2m tall, a tree has a way to grow yet, and might quickly outpace any space you planned for it.
Beautifying concrete and paved areas takes a bit of imagination. But you can create the illusion of several square metres of garden space without the associated weeding and cultivating. Think outside the square into pots, containers and hanging baskets.
Provided the plant doesn't have a deep tap root or a huge spreading root system, it'll grow happily in a container. And the container can be anything, from a simple do-it-yourself box made of leftover timber fence palings to a concrete tub or even plastic pots painted in bright colours.
You can even make the paving itself a feature by spacing it wider than a standard cobbled area and planting low-growing herbs and moss types in between the cobbles.
There are some affordable and effective temporary cover-ups and privacy screens available to fill the gap until nature takes over.
Trellis is magic. It comes in a wide range of shapes and sizes and can be nailed up to provide both a climbing frame for the plants as they grow and a privacy screen in the meantime. The new Chinese blinds, made in tanalised timber, are a nice variation on the theme and let you see out while obscuring the view in.
If you can't live with bare timber look, get some quick-fix plants to occupy the same space as your growing vines and provide a season of beauty while you're waiting. Sweet pea seedlings, for instance, reach a height of around two metres in a short space of time and flower in 12 to 14 weeks after planting. And they love sunshine, ideally on a north-south perspective.
Sunflowers are another spectacular temporary measure.
At ground level, fill the bare area around a young perennial with "instant colour" pots, pansies, impatiens, petunias, and other fast-growing colourful annuals.
Making a new section look good is hard work in the interim, but once the garden is established, usually in two to five years, your labour will be substantially reduced and the early planning amply rewarded.
