Designing Your Garden – Basic Principles Part 1

Before you know it the seed and plant catalogs will be showing up in your mailbox. All those gorgeous pictures full of color have you practically dancing to get into the garden. You can just feel the vigor and beauty of the flowers and other plants bursting from the pages. Next thing you know you have a long list of new plants and seed that you are going to buy. But wait. How will all these lovely flowers fit into your garden?

Before you know it the seed and plant catalogs will be showing up in your mailbox. All those gorgeous pictures full of color have you practically dancing to get into the garden. You can just feel the vigor and beauty of the flowers and other plants bursting from the pages. Next thing you know you have a long list of new plants and seed that you are going to buy. But wait. How will all these lovely flowers fit into your garden?

That is where knowing the basic principles of design comes in handy. These principles will guide you in creating a garden and landscaping that is lovely to look at and be in. Otherwise you may wonder if you have any artistic sense at all.

Although good design may be instinctive for some people, the rest of us can achieve it through education and some trial and error. Granted that trial and error can be rather expensive for some elements of garden and landscaping design, but for the masses of smaller plantings and garden accessories, this can actually be fun.

One might wonder why we should bother with these principles in designing our garden and landscaping at all. Just throw some masses of colorful flowers out into the yard and call it a garden. Perhaps this will work for you, but if it does, you are probably one of those for whom these principles are instinctive. For others, think of what is left when the blooms are gone. This is when the elements of your design really shine.

In considering the principles of design, we mostly deal with the mass of our plantings and non-living elements, the textures of these elements and their colors. Again, that is mass, texture and color. One could argue that color and texture are also principles of design but as they are so inherent in the other principles, let’s not make them separate.

Perhaps the most basic of all the design principles for gardening and landscaping are balance, unity, harmony, utility and suitability. Of these, providing balance of the various elements may well be the most important.

Symmetry of like items is needed in a formal garden. Meaning a tall conical evergreen on one side of the courtyard will be balanced by a tall conical evergreen on the other side. But few of us have truly formal gardens.

With our more informal gardens and landscaping, it becomes more a matter of balancing the mass on each side of your dividing line. This dividing line is usually based on how you observe the garden. However, there are other aspects to balance. Balance should be considered in the amount of hardy plants to the more tender plants according to your area and of plants to the non-living elements within your garden and landscape. Balance the color of your plantings and non-living elements, the light and dark tones of your elements, and the proportion of evergreens to deciduous plantings. For more everyday gardeners, balance mostly has to do with the mass of your elements balancing each other.

Keep the balance of your entire garden and landscaping elements in mind as the seasons progress as well. You are going to want color throughout the year. The non-living elements as well as the living provide this.

Next article later this week we will touch on the other principles used in designing your garden and landscaping.