> Next: Drawing a Landscape Plan
How to Plan a Landscape
Planning a garden follows a set of simple considerations, including matching the architecture of the home, fitting within the neighborhood or nearby natural features, and working with texture, shape, and sizes of each design element or plant to unify the landscape.
Garden Designs and Plans
Rather than bog down with endless options, start planning a flower landscape by reflecting on what you want your garden to say about you and your home. Regardless of whether the scope of the project is a whole yard or a feature in part of your yard, begin with how you’ll use that space.
Plans Begin With Use
While it’s tempting to begin by gathering tools and picking plants, slow down and take a minute.
Yards are used for many things, from providing curb appeal for your house to entertaining and from recreation to maintenance. Map out the areas of your yard for each of these and other activities.
Next, make a “bubble diagram” of your yard, drawing ovals for these activity areas. Low-activity areas will become apparent, places for flower beds and large plantings.
Matching Architecture and Style
Examine your home with an eye towards its architecture, style, color, and materials. You’ll want a landscape that works with, enhances, and matches these important elements.
Formal homes with a traditional appearance suit gardens with geometric patterns, neat and orderly borders, paths lined with edgings or hedges, and flowers with coordinated colors.
If your home’s style is Georgian, Federal, English Tudor, or a mansard-roofed French Colonial, begin thinking of such landscaping to match its architecture.
On the other hand, if you live in a contemporary, ranch, Cape Cod, Victorian, Edwardian, or German gothic revival house, informal or natural garden designs may be more appropriate styles for your landscape.
Make note of the colors of the house, trim, fences, and garages, sheds, or other detached structures. You’ll refer to these palettes of color later when you choose materials for beds, paths, and flowering plants.
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Design Choices
There are endless design combinations possible within the realm of flowering plants, trees, shrubs, and vines. You’ll combine and feature these elements as you plan the landscaped areas of your yard outside of its main activity areas.
Formal Designs
Formal gardens—including Italianate, French formal, geometric, and Asian zen—date back to medieval Europe, the Roman Empire, Near-East Persian Empire and Islamic eras, and to the Far East.
These primary sources of design break into two groups, those based on the Greek-Renaissance era of mathematical golden-rectangles and ratios derived from natural objects, and another based on curves and circles. Both are exceptionally pleasing to the human eye.
Plan formal garden areas with pleasing combinations of lines and edges to balance plants and architectural features. Think of the area layout of course, but also consider these as areas you’ll bound with walls and ceilings of greenery and tree canopies, and floors of natural materials or paving.
Within these areas, choose focal points with specimen plants, sculptures, fountains, or trees that are beautiful both within the garden, but also when viewed from outside its boundaries—perhaps through an arched gate, an arbor, or a window from the home.
Informal Designs
Gardens with a casual flair are popular alternatives to the careful layout and geometry of their formal-garden cousins, but that’s an illusion. Their informality is every bit as carefully planned as the straight lines and repeating patterns of formal landscaping.
The elements included in informal gardens have few sharp corners, straight lines, or group patterns. Instead, sinuous curves, rounded shapes and groups, and varied heights are typical.
The secret comes in repeating shapes and forms with different materials and choices of plants. While the eye sees no pattern, this sleight-of-hand design trick invisibly unites the garden.
A path of gravel might have the same curve as a walk of brick; a pyramid-pruned shrub might mirror a cone-shaped evergreen tree. Three plants form the same triangle as an obelisk trellis with a climbing vine. Groups of four and seven flowers in an S-shaped planting may repeat with four or seven evergreen shrubs.
There are, of course, informal gardens that are carefully random, and these feel more like true natural landscapes. Gardeners toss a handful of markers over their shoulder into a bed without looking and plant a bulb where each of the markers fall.
They mix seeds of several different annual plants and enjoy the surprise when those seeds are planted, sprout, and bloom.
Formal or Informal?
The choice of design—formal or informal— is either up to you, will match the architecture and materials of your home, or result from the ways you use your yard.
Starting and Ending Points
Performing the exercise of drawing a bubble diagram that shows different areas of use in your yard nearly always results in revealing several low-use garden areas.
Focus on these areas and develop plans for filling these spaces. Because each is unique in size and shape and is likely separated from other low-use areas, it’s of little importance that they all be identical. Embrace that freedom to make them stand apart. You’ll use color and material choices to unify them later.
Designing with Texture and Shape
Texture, Shape, and Size as Design Elements
Give your landscape depth and refinement by carefully choosing plant textures and shapes. Basic principles to use while planning your plantings will create a garden that is satisfying, both up close and at a distance.
Texture
The texture of plants is in their foliage—whether smooth to touch or rough, glossy or dull, fuzzy or prickly. More generally, plants have fine-, medium-, or coarse-textured foliage. Alyssum in a group planting is a good example of a fine-textured flower. In contrast, plants with large leaves such as bear’s breech are considered coarse textured.
Fine-textured plants have a delicate, smooth appearance; coarse-textured plants are bolder, and medium-textured plants fall in between.
Carefully select and place plants in your garden. Using their foliage texture, it is possible to create an optical illusion of added space.
Coarse textures often appear to be closer than they really are, while fine textures seem farther away. Make a small backyard appear more expansive with a foreground of coarsely textured plants and gradually taper to very finely textured shrubs at the property’s edge. They eye will be fooled to think the distance is wider than it actually is.
Artfully mix textures. Placing bold-leaved perennials next to a delicate flowers creates textural contrast. Use plants of several different shapes or several colors to make your garden more interesting.
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Shape and Size
Plants can be round like a beach ball or columnar like a pillar—and they also can be fountain-like, spreading, billowing, or bunched. Play different shapes off one another to vary your beds’ appeal.
Keep in mind each plant’s mature size as you plan. It’s common to overplant a landscape. When that happens, it matures too quickly, becomes crowded, and plants must be removed.
Also avoid planting too close together, too near structures, or over buried utility lines.
Your Surroundings
Take advantage of your surroundings, your neighborhood, and nearby plantings.
If a next-door neighbor’s landscape is mostly shrubs and trees, artfully blend your yard at the boundary. Mimic some of the shapes, forms, colors, and textures of their yards in this boundary zone.
Mature existing trees usually are a bonus. They add a great deal to the visual interest of nearby homes. Blend your design elements into your neighborhood.
Nearby Gardens
Nearby yards with tall hedges, patches of dense shrubs, ornamental grasses, or native flowers may suggest ways for your landscape to evolve as you plant.
Choose complementary flower color palettes, focusing on the perfect spectral hues, tones, and contrasts that will make your landscape stand out yet belong in its setting.
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Suburban and Urban Sites
Homes in the suburbs often have natural areas nearby. Woodlands, meadows, forests—all are rich in design elements that you can adapt into your landscape plan.
Urban gardening may be more limited, but make the most of your location. Adding structural elements such as climbing vines, window box planters, or large structural containers suited to plantings scaled to your site’s dimensions are ways to respond to your environment and add to its beauty.
Summing up
These are just some of the ways you can adjust, adapt, and blend your home’s landscape elements into its site and setting.
You’ll be surprised how quickly you’ll start to look at areas of your yard with a new eye, filling it with possibilities.
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