Chapter 2
Thinking like a Designer
IN THIS CHAPTER
Making an attractive, useful home landscape is both an art and a science. If you’re reading this book, you’re willing to giving it a go, right?
Designing your property makes it a good and appealing place to be, just like designing the indoors. Take into account your available space, and discover tricks that can make your outside seem either more open or cozier. Color, texture, size, and shape options are endless; the look just depends on your taste. You may well want to include accessories, from the practical to the purely decorative (or items that are actually both). You have lots of choices to ponder, lots of decisions to make, and lots of exciting possibilities to consider.
The object is to create a place that reflects your lifestyle, plant passions, and personality. No need to struggle or stress out with the myriad of choices you have, though. This chapter is here to provide a helpful tour of design principles, tailored to DIY landscapers. That’s you. You can do this.
You get to spend your time, creativity, money, and effort while you can. You’ll be maintaining and replacing both plants and hardscape elements while at this address. Live in and love your landscape. You take care of it, and it will take care of you. As the great poet William Blake once remarked, wisely, “Kiss the joy as it flies.”
Achieving Unity, Blessed Unity, in Your Landscaping Design
Unity is what keeps all those separate parts of your landscape tied together, so that the eyes and feet of visitors flow from one part of the yard to another. To achieve unity in your landscape, do the following:
Clearly define pathways. Pathways are a first step (no pun intended!) to unifying your landscape. Chapter 7 gives more details how you can add paths and walkways to your design.
Link greenery. A couple of shade trees and a flowering shrub stuck here and there in your lawn don’t create a unified landscape design. Plant a bed of pachysandra, lirope, or other groundcover or even lay down a thick layer of wood chips at the feet of these to visually link them together, continue the same groundcover along the fence and around the corner to the patio, stick in a couple more of the same sort of flowering shrub at the corner, and presto! Unity.
Have a style. Be clear about what you want the garden to say about you. Consider the following:If your tastes run to formal precision, for instance, you probably want clipped hedges, classic statuary, brick or stone pathways, and symmetrical plantings that provide calming mirror images.A cottage garden jumble of exuberant flowers with a rustic fence, bent-twig benches, and a concrete frog along the path tells visitors that you’re more of a free-spirit type.A combination of the two styles looks disjointed and has a disquieting effect on your landscape. But having unity in your landscape doesn’t mean that you can’t have your formal rose garden and your wildflower meadow — just don’t put them side-by-side. Separated by a hedge, on opposite sides of the house, or linked by a transition zone that gradually makes the shift from control to wilder, your gardens can be as fickle as your little heart desires. Look at the color insert for a way to add unity to your yard.
Focusing on Repetition in Your Design
Repetition of hardscape materials — including brick, wood, stone, concrete, wood chips, and fencing — is a simple way to make your garden look like it’s all one piece, even if the areas are distinctly different. The following can make your landscaping design cohesive:
Select your hardscape materials to match your garden style and repeat them throughout the landscape. Manmade materials — basically, anything other than plants — carry great weight in the landscape, because they draw viewers’ eyes like a magnet.For example, you can use a single section of diagonal, framed lattice to support a climbing rose along the wall of your house; an L-shaped couple of sections to shield the compost pile from view; or three or four linked sections to serve as a privacy screen along the patio. Depending on how large your yard is, you can repeat the lattice theme in variation by installing solid, vertical-board privacy fence topped by a narrow strip of lattice. (Want a rustic look? Substitute bent-wood or plain lumber. Want a more formal look? Use cast iron and similar-looking materials. You get the idea … .)
Stick in the same plants here and there. (Think, “Here a shrub, there a shrub.”) Repeat backbone plants that perform well most of the year, like evergreens (see Chapter 11), groundcovers (refer to Chapter 16), and shrubs (check out Chapter 12), to tie your garden areas to each other.
Repeat shapes to pull things together. Consider curved outlines of beds, undulating paths, shapely urns, and mounds of plants. At the other end of the spectrum, try no-nonsense point A to point B paths, yardstick-straight bed edges, spiky plant forms, clipped hedges, and vertical board fences.
Use colors again and again. By repeating colors throughout the landscape, you make it look like it’s all one piece — the unity thing again. For example, put in clumps of yellow flowers here and there in various beds, pots, or plantings across your back yard, and you’ll find your eye travels from one patch of yellow to the next in a seamless, satisfying way. But if the most eye-catching plant in one bed is red, the next one yellow, the next one white, your poor eyes get confused.Combine colors of plants with colors of your house or hardscape, too, for unity’s sake. For instance, paint a lattice cobalt blue and match it with big folk-art blue-and-yellow flower pots, and you can use that two-tone color scheme to run through the garden.
Playing with Color
Color in your home landscape, just like color indoors, creates moods and impressions. Because your canvas is a living canvas, you can experiment, make discoveries, change your mind, tweak and tinker, and … honestly … have fun. Refer to the color insert to spark your imagination on how you can use color