My New, Improved Garden Map

Click for greater detail.

In my last post, I shared a few of my favorite garden maps, and mentioned that I needed to update my own garden map, as I had made some significant changes to my garden areas in the last year.

I've finished the new, updated map, such as it is. It's no great work of art, not a beautiful perspective map with lovely artistic drawings or watercolor paintings of the house and gardens such as those done by real artists in my last post. Mine is only a topographical map, drawn and traced with the aid of Google Earth and colored in with colored pencils. But I believe it's more accurate than my previous map.

Plus, I have included more labels in this map. When I was writing my last post about garden maps, I realized how important the labels are in garden maps: they serve to personalize a garden and communicate information about the purpose and design intentions of the various areas. (Before, I guess I thought that the labels might deface a map and make it harder to view, but I now realize that this isn't the case at all.) Thus I have labelled many more areas in my new map, including important trees. I hope this will tell more about my gardens than my last map:

My old garden map, done in January 2013. I think the numbering of areas made it harder to understand. Labels are better.

The biggest changes in my gardens that can be seen on the maps, are in the areas to the northwest of my house: the new West Island, North Island and Yellow Garden are now depicted (the removal of one of the two ash trees is evident where the Yellow Garden is now -- there's still one ash tree in the North Island, although it's hard to see in the drawing).

Google Earth finally posted an updated aerial view of my property last June, so it was easy for me to make a new map. Here are the steps I used:

1. I saved a photo of my property from Google Earth,
2. Then, I made the colors lighter using Photoshop (so the outlines of the structures and areas can be discerned through another piece of paper) and printed it out, so that it fit the whole size of the paper. 
3. Then I lightly taped another piece of paper on top of the printed photo and, holding it up to my computer screen so that it was backlit, very lightly traced with a pencil over the outlines of the various structures, trees and garden bed outlines. 
4. Then I colored in the traced areas with colored pencils, adding details to planting beds, etc., and used a straight edge and a regular pencil to make the outlines of buildings more definite. Then I removed the bottom taped photo.
5. I scanned the image and used Photoshop to adjust the colors on the map, to label the areas and to add a title and a compass image, which I found online. 
6. Lastly, I saved it as a JPG file so it wouldn't be too large to post.

(Ed.: Thanks to Linda for her suggestion that I include a map scale in the map; I hadn't thought of that before. I guess in most garden maps they're not necessary, except for the very largest estate maps. I don't have a grand estate, but I do live on five acres, although only about three acres of the property is depicted -- there's a two-acre field to the left that I have left out so that I could focus in on the cultivated areas. For scale, it's about 150 yards/140 meters from the top (north) edge of my property to the bottom (south) edge depicted in the map.)

Again, the result is not a great work of art, but it certainly suffices to communicate the plan of my gardens to anyone who might be interested in them.

Now, I'm working on trying to figure out a way to make the areas of my map clickable, perhaps with hover images or at least links to pages about each area. Since I don't know much about HTML, this is going to take some research and fiddling. We'll see if I'm successful....

I'd love to see how other bloggers map out their gardens -- do you include a map on your blog? Thanks for sharing, and for reading! -Beth