Sharing an early garden sketch with another person, especially when the drawing is not yet resolved, can be intimidating. But if you learn what to ask for, feedback is one of the most powerful ways to hone your design judgment. The catch is that the feedback needs to be specific. If you ask a general question, you are more likely to get an answer that is too general to be useful. Here’s a typical scenario. You show a beginning design to a friend, and you ask, “What do you think?” The answer might be, “I like it” or “I don’t know . . . something doesn’t feel right.” Those responses are honest, but they don’t give you any guidance for what to change on that page. Useful feedback starts with a more defined target.
You might ask, for example, whether the path system feels straightforward to navigate, whether the focal destination is defined strongly enough, or whether the planting masses seem overly fragmented. Before you ask for any input at all, determine which piece of your drawing is up for review. If your project is in its infancy, ask about its framework rather than its details. That means you’re focusing on paths, open space, major shapes, the way you move through the space, and how the garden relates to the house or the property lines. If your framework is already in place, you can ask about planting detail instead, such as rhythm, balance, or the amount of seasonal change. To address all of these layers at the same time is usually to create confusion.
One suggestion will talk about circulation, and another will talk about color, and a third will raise a maintenance issue, so you end up pushing your drawing in three different directions at once. It’s usually more helpful to isolate one layer of your design and work on that before you move to the next. Another pitfall to watch for is defending your decisions too quickly. As soon as you hear a suggestion that makes you uncomfortable, you may find yourself explaining why you made a particular choice.
That tendency defeats the purpose of asking for feedback in the first place. If a suggestion is made, say, that your front entrance feels narrow, or that your planting shape seems fussy, try not to leap into an immediate justification for why you drew it that way. Instead, ask what made that person feel that way. Did you draw the front walk too narrow? Did you curve it too many times? Did you place the planting edge in competition with the front step? When you use specific questions to probe a general comment, you often turn that comment into a suggestion you can act on. Once you understand the reason behind it, you can address it more easily and less emotionally. One excellent strategy for getting useful feedback is to draw two versions of the same area and place them side by side as you ask for input.
You might sketch, for instance, a front walk that approaches the front door in a straight line and another front walk that approaches the front door on a curve. You might sketch a flower border with six small clumps of daylily and another flower border with three larger clumps. Then ask which version feels more serene, or more legible, or less high maintenance. When you compare two options, you give the viewer something tangible to respond to. You also teach yourself an excellent design lesson: that it often produces better results to test multiple options than to try to perfect only your first option.
Sometimes simply making such a comparison will reveal a problem that you can’t see when you look at only one version of your sketch. If you have fifteen minutes to create a sketch to share with someone else, don’t use them to create a complete sketch. Use them to create a sketch that will prompt useful feedback instead. Spend five minutes drawing the framework of a patio edge, or a border, or a front walk. Spend five minutes drawing the aspect of that sketch you want feedback on, maybe the simplicity of the path system, or the power of the focal point.