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There are a few fundamental things that set apart a space, that is, an ordinary yard, and an intentional landscape that is more like a work of art. The first is the ability to observe. Designers know how to observe space in a way that the average person does not. Even in the most ordinary landscapes, there is a path that is often curvilinear, trees that shade at certain times of the day, and micro grading that affect how we feel when walking through the space. All of these observations can be leveraged to create intentional design, but first you have to see them. There are many more things a designer observes when visiting a space, but that’s a topic for a different post.
The point is that the trained eye of a designer sees more than the untrained eye, and that’s the first part of designing a landscape. The second is balance. Every space, inside or out, needs balance to feel good, to feel right. It doesn’t matter if it is a modern landscape of clean lines and simple shapes, or a lush English garden; balance is what makes it feel good. Without balance, no matter how beautiful the plants or hardscape, the space will always feel haphazard and unplanned.
Balance refers to the way the visual weight of different elements in the landscape are distributed. It is a visual concept, not physical. For example, a large stone wall has a lot of visual weight, but so does a clump of dark green arborvitae or a brightly colored perennial. The visual weight of elements in a landscape are affected by all sorts of things such as size, color, texture, shape, etc. The third fundamental thing that sets apart a designed landscape from an ordinary yard is movement through the space. Unless your landscape is a postage stamp yard, you will be moving through it.
That means that your landscape will be viewed from many different vantage points. Designers think about this as they design. They consider how someone will move through the space and what they will see at each point. They think about how to create different areas, or rooms, within the yard. A good landscape is designed for the way that you will interact with it. The last fundamental thing is planting design. We’ll get into the details of planting design in a minute, but the point is that it is intentional. This is not throwing a few plants into the ground and hoping they don’t die.
This is thoughtfully selecting plants that will achieve your goals for the space, whether that is a screen to block the neighbors, flowers to attract pollinators, or ground cover to stabilize a slope. Landscape designers know how to select plants based on all sorts of factors, from what the light and soil conditions are like, to the mature size of the plant, to how fast or slow the plant grows. We will be covering more on planting design in our next blog.
