Landscaping Design: The 4 Principles of Success
One of the most effective ways you can increase the eye appeal and value of your home with quality landscaping design. A home surrounded by a well-planned landscaping design will just look more cared-for and expensive than one without it.
Do you need to turn to a landscaping professional to transform your yard into a showpiece? Not necessarily, if you’re willing to educate yourself in a few landscaping design principles. If you have a relatively good eye, and appreciate art, you can probably pick up want you need to know about effective landscaping design without too much difficulty.
Balance
The first element to consider in your landscaping design is balance. Concentrating the bulk of your plantings in a single area may leave the rest of your yard looking neglected. So try to distribute your plantings evenly around your yard.
This doesn’t mean, however, that every area of your landscaping design has to be identical. Asymmetrical plantings of different plants in the same proportion will keep the various parts of your garden in balance.
Proportion
The second element of good landscaping design, proportion, is fairly easy to understand. You need to keep your landscaping design features proportionate to the area surrounding them. A tiny back yard will not lend itself to a large gazebo, no matter how much you may want one.
Conversely, a spacious front yard will swallow your single row of grape hyacinths each spring. Common sense will probably guide you sufficiently in choosing properly proportioned landscaping design features.
Transition
Transition is related to proportion. While your landscaping design can certainly combine small flowers with sizeable shrubbery, the only effective way to make them attractive is with transition.
You’ll need some medium and large plants between your small ones and those shrubs, to give visual “flow” to your overall landscaping design. You can make the flow more interesting if your variously sized plants also have varying colors and textures.
Unity
The final element of landscaping design, and the one which you are ultimately trying to achieve, is unity. Your balancing, proportional, transitional, coloring, and textural choices should all be made with a final unified landscaping design in mind. The best way to get where you want to go when you are traveling is to have a map, and the same is true with landscaping design.
Pick a “theme” and stick with it. If you want an English Garden look, go with roses, a perennial border, flagstone walkways, and privet hedges. Stay away from bamboo, koi ponds, and pagodas. You may love the idea of pagoda shaped lanterns to provide nighttime lighting in your landscaping, but will they really work in a border of hollyhocks, snapdragons, and phlox?
No matter what basic landscaping design theme you select, Mother Nature will have provided a sufficient variety of theme-appropriate plants so that your yard need never be boring. Just focus on the overall unity of your finished design, and you will be rewarded with a visually stunning, home-value enhancing, yet natural yard!