Gardens and Flowers -*- Understanding Landscaping: How to Plan a Stunning Garden

Planning a stunning garden isn’t a mysterious process, just one that requires learning some basic principles of landscape design and adjusting your ideas to include them.

By Esmee McCornall

The point of landscaping is to set off the buildings within the landscape to best advantage and create a design that is welcoming, lovely and makes viewers feel good. Think, for a moment, about how you felt the last time you sat quietly in a beautiful garden—peaceful, relaxed, in harmony with your surroundings, perhaps even spiritually inspired. However, to recreate those feelings in your new landscape, you need to do more than just buy a few trees, shrubs and flowers. It requires first developing a workable design and plan for the landscape you want to have.

The first landscape design principle you need to consider is unity: great landscaping appears as a unified whole, not merely as individual parts of the space. You can create unity by keeping the height, texture, colors, and sizes of the plantings you select in harmony with each other and choosing paving and accent materials that blend harmoniously with them.

For example, if you live in the middle west, you might choose tallish elms as your main trees, want to a shorter but rather dense plant such as privet or boxwood to use as a hedge around the perimeter or to visually separate different sections like rose beds and vegetable garden from each other, and creeping periwinkle as a ground cover. For pathways, you might choose old bricks for the perimeter and dark colored tree bark shavings for interior paths that lead to a white wood pergola.

If you live in the southwest, you might choose Joshua trees, cacti and succulents for the basis of your plantings and use red boulders as landscape visuals and paths made of crushed rock. Both these landscapes have a clear and discernible theme, which makes it easy to choose appropriate plants and garden accessories.

To begin with, keep your design simple and balanced. As you become more proficient at landscape design—and as the trees, shrubs, plants and flowers that formed you initial planting become mature—you will see opportunities to improve on and enhance your basic design. Choose two or three colors for your flowerbeds and repeat them throughout your garden using different flowering plants. Keep the colors of your accessories such as boulders, garden furniture and pathways uniform.

Strive for simplicity and symmetrical balance in which matching garden elements are more or less equally spaced. Though unbalanced, asymmetrical designs can be quite striking, unless you’re an expert in design, leave them for later, when you’ve gained more experience.