Make the most of your time, energy and money by producing a master plan before you start work on your garden.

This way you can keep to your plan, however long a period the project turns out to take, and avoid developing your garden in a haphazard fashion. The last thing you need is to carefully (and perhaps expensively) create one area of the garden to then discover you cannot design other essentials around it.

So draw up your overall design first, then set your priorities for action, and then (and only then) can you start thinking about details such as which plants to put where. Remember that there are plants and solutions for every garden situation - shade, sun, poor soil, wet areas - and requirement - play area, pets, flowers, food - so there's no need to worry about this at too early a stage.

If you're not sure what type of garden you'd like, then look at the variety of possible garden styles shown on Crocus' website. If you like more than one, and if you have the space, you could always partition your garden and create a different style in each section.