I have just become converted to Pinterest. It’s a great source of ideas for your garden, including design, planting, features – anything you can find in a photo that is about gardening. Here’s how to start using Pinterest, and some of its benefits.
Using Pinterest
1. Sign up to the Pinterest site (http://pinterest.com/) and go to the Help section to set up your account. (Scroll down to ‘Pinterest Basics’.)
2. Start a pinboard on a subject of interest. Once you have put the board in a subject category, you’ll be able to look at other Pinners’ photos on the same subject. The Gardening section is a goldmine of ideas, or you can type in keyboards to the search engine.
3. Use other Pinner photos, upload your own, or find photos on the Web, to put together your board. Once you have downloaded the ‘Pin it’ link, (go here to do this) you simply find a photo on the Web that you want, click the ‘Pin it’ link and you’ll be able to put the photo onto the board of your choice. It’s so easy, the problem is knowing when to stop!
Benefits/uses of Pinterest
- As mood boards for planning your garden. If you don’t know what you want, use a search engine to find gardening photos, or just browse through the Pinterest Gardening section, and Pin things that strike your fancy. Some of the gardening magazines have websites you could use as a photo source, or try Shoot or any of the big gardening websites. This will help you decide what overall style and atmosphere you want to create.
- As a way of stimulating your imagination. Looking through the existing Pinterest pinboards gives many lovely examples you can use of different ways of doing things, from unusual pergolas and seats to plant combinations and ponds.
- As a means of organising your ideas. When you gather things together that inspire you, you can quite often find a theme running through them which will help with overall planning – a basis to start off your design. And if you have a lot of scattered photos and links, this will help you organise them. And seeing them together could spark off more ideas, or progress your idea along.
- To decide what to buy. If you are looking for, say, a pergola, you easily collect examples on a board, to help you decide what you want. You can also put them in your ‘mood board’ to see how they fit in with the feel of your desired garden.
I hope you find this useful -happy Pinning!
