MEASURING YOUR GARDEN: OFFSETS

Let's stay with the example on the earlier page and imagine you have a curved wall already in the garden that you want to keep, as in Figure 1 below. You will need to mark its position accurately on the plan.

Triangulate points A and B and mark them on your scaled plan. In the garden, with a second measuring tape if possible, mark a line from point A that is parallel to the house. You will have to take measurements every 30cm along this line and transpose each measurement to scale on your plan. This allows you to plot the curve every 30cm. (See Figure 2). You can see that, to get a very accurate curve, it takes a lot of measuring. To save time, you can choose to take your offsets at 60cm intervals and draw the curve slightly more freehand.

Now, plot the scaled measurments onto your plan to give you your curve.(Figure 3)

All that's left to do is to join up the dots to complete your curve.

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