Five easy-to-remember and follow design principles to guide your landscape plans.
Everyone wants to do it: showcase a beautiful landscape space around their home. It may seem outside most people’s abilities and budgets, but that is simply not true. With some ingenuity, guidance, and effort, homeowners can create a beautiful yard that is a tribute to their home and neighborhood.
It is no surprise that gardeners want to take the wealth of nature and surround themselves with as much of its sights, sounds, and scents to enjoy each day. What a challenge that proves as new plant introductions are brought to light! And designs that showcase the many ways to use plants are mind-boggling in number.
With all the possibilities, it sometimes seems beyond our grasp to create what we want to bring out of our imagination.
Different Strokes for Different Folks
Of course, not everyone thrives on planning the design of a garden with researching, graphs, and drawing abstract blobs and squiggles. It seems too much work – and anyway, it is paper and pen, not earth and botanical life! Some gardeners just love the experience of growing things, and the overall form isn’t nearly as important as putting plants in the ground.
In contrast, there are those who love looking at gardens, but the whole idea of devoting time and sweat into the making of it seems unappealing. (I can’t help but think they just haven’t been made aware of how much impact the landscape makes on us everyday and what satisfaction it gives a gardener. But that’s me.)
Yet all of us appreciate something of nature’s beauty close at hand, whether we simply walk through it to reach the front door or revel in the greater part of our hours spent somehow in its beds and paths.
The point is, that if you would like to design and grow your own garden, you can!
If you have half a will to learn a few concepts and put them to work in the making of a plan, it is more than likely that the result will be attractive and something you will actually love doing.
What Design Principles are needed for a Beautiful Garden?
For those who want something lovely in their landscape, here is offered a few considerations. Guide your plans to design a beautiful garden with the following ideas.
1. Decide Important Priorities
Plan for your taste and means
Not just in your yard, but to you as a person. “Know thyself” will extend to how much satisfaction the process of building a garden will be. The labor and time you want to put into your landscaping.
The honest truth helps make the decisions on the design, and whether to hire help. We change and our gardens change. This self-understanding will also grow over time and might lead to drastic changes in the garden.
As Plantings Mature
What starts out beautifully in a new garden, won’t look so pleasing if the owner can’t give it the care it needs. Exchanging features that require attention for those which are less demanding in work and time might remake the design.
That is why I feel that creating the plan in steps, starting small is important for beginning gardeners. It will depend very much on what you personally want to bring to it. Not everyone is a devoted gardener.
Designing A Place for People
“A garden is for people” is a concept that leads to perhaps the most attractive of outdoor spaces.
Certain plans should be given consideration when they include what you and your family most need from their yard. And don’t forget nature itself.
Your plot of the earth is given to you, but remember the other creatures that share it. Remember why we love being outside in the first place! The songs of birds, the grace of butterflies, the darting animation of a hummingbird. These considerations might well be a large part of how the land outside your home is cultivated and constructed.
Which Are You? A Gardener of Delights – Or a Taskmaster?
Are we among those who practically live and breathe flowers? Perhaps we should step back and enjoy our places more. How dull to only see the nature around us as a set of tasks. I know I fall into that more than I’d like to admit.
It only takes some introspection, in why I love it so, to remind me to sit in my “anti-gravity” chair and look up at the sky through the leafy green canopy; or sit on the bench under my lilac and gaze at the lavender walk instead of laboring away at the weeding.
Enjoy your yard. Do take time to smell the roses… And lavender ,,,and all the heady scents of summer. Allow the curious hummingbird to pay you a visit as you sit there and watch. Design your garden to allow for this time well spent. Placement of seating spaces will help create these restful spaces.
Serenity Garden2. Consider Alternate Garden Designs
Do you love the serene backdrop of a peaceful green landscape? Perhaps an enclosed “Serenity Garden” for rest and meditation? The idea of a low maintenance retreat with plantings that filter out the noise and hubbub of city life makes this a design that works with almost any home and yard.
3. Remember Basic Principles: Think Of Shapes And Spaces
Shapes, spaces, sun, and shadow
Watch the video with John Brookes sharing his treasury of knowledge. So much can be gleaned from listening to gardeners experienced for so many years with the best of gardens and plant materials! A remarkable design tip that stands out: think of the larger spaces, and do not worry about the details in laying out a garden.
So often we think of colors and plantings, but what of the flow of the spaces and the feeling that sun and shadow will give? Think of the property as it forms those shapes and spaces.
Do It Right, Considerations for a Beautiful Garden
Well-designed waterfall
This might be about growing the right plant in the right place. It might be about taking the care in the construction of a retaining wall or a path. But as in all things the care and maintenance adds to the overall impression. Call it good grooming for your garden.
When building the garden bones of the spaces with features such as arbors or a pond, a fence or a driveway, try to use materials that will last, if you possibly can.
Try to integrate your own yard with those of the area around you. We Americans value individuality, and that is a seedbed for innovation and creativity, but in nature, there is a sense of rightness that comes of an entire ecosystem. Certain plants and growth patterns that give a place its identity. Beautiful gardens keep such characteristics in mind.
A well grown garden is always a joy to behold.
4. Don’t Be Afraid To Be Bold in Design
Drift of Russian Sage
One of the biggest mistakes I think I am prone to is to be “bitty” about the plans and projects I make. Having collector tendencies only makes it worse. While detail is a pretty addition, sometimes what is needed is a broad swash of texture or color to give the eye rest and the soul a feeling of satisfying abundance. I think this is why Gertrude Jekyll’s admonition to use plants in large “drifts” to design a beautiful garden.
Bring your plants into the landscape with large enough numbers to make an impact. In fact, wildlife such as bees thrive in such areas. This is not modern monoculture, but the diversity of a natural environment brought into a smaller dimension.
Collector, Curator, Exhibtor, Artist?
I don’t think I will ever stop being something of a collector, but my plantings look better and healthier when grown in large groups. I haven’t regretted allowing bigger thinking in the garden.
Color and personality
Bold also refers to color. We will each have our preferences, but sometimes it brings the design to life when strong color is infused into it.
One way to do this without complete commitment is to use flowering containers.
As I’ve grown older and needed to travel more during the growing season, this has become the main way I include annual color. It also suits my changeable nature, with a fresh palette possible each year. If you have always stayed safe with a pastel garden plan of pinks, whites, and blues… you may surprise yourself with a love of magenta in just the right place.
5. A Beautiful Principle Is To Be Personal
I saved the most important point for last. We see it everyday, the uniqueness that is you makes the world more interesting, and infinitely more beautiful.
There is something so very attractive about gardens that bear the imprint of their owner. And that is not even mentioning the great pleasure that a property will give its owner when it isn’t a bland cookie cutter rendition of an uncaring builder’s choice of dull lawn and plants.
A private yard with a sense of fun!
There might be many “do’s and don’ts” which blog or magazine articles might give you. However, the best garden advice is to discover what gives you joy in your own little (or big!) plot. That imagined vision inside your mind, the one referred to at the beginning of this post is the one that design principles and garden ideas is to give wings to…
Your vision, your own beautiful garden.
