Third in the series article
Beautiful and Enjoyable Garden Design is More than a Collection of Good Plants
This month we're looking at Pattern and Texture as the elements of design and Repetition and Grouping as the ways of achieving compositional unity.
If you would like to read or review the previous second part in this series of garden design articles, please click here.
In review,
Good design means that there is an organization of the elements of design into a compositionally unified whole.
Why does unity matter? It's simple. If your garden design doesn't have compositional unity, then your design just doesn't work. It would be like running outside and planting your new flowers wherever you spotted a space in your yard that day. Soon you would have a hodgepodge of plantings with no unifying design. Your eye would hop from spot to spot in your yard without a clue where to look first. If your garden were large or small, you would look at your garden and it would feel like it was several gardens working at odds with each other rather than working together in a unified design. That's the difference between a design that works and one that doesn't work.
And now,
Pattern and Texture should be tools we use to add lushness to our garden vistas while Repetition and Grouping hold everything together and simplify and consolidate all the visual variety into a unified composition.
Texture and Pattern
Look at the first photo above and see the striking patterns within the different leaves and rocks. How much more interesting a garden is when you see the flat, round lotus leaves contrasting with angular iris. How much more pleasing we find a garden when we see the texture of old, moss-covered rocks complementing the very different texture of liquid reflecting from the surface of a pond.
These different visual textures please our eye and give our gardens layers of depth. We've all seen production gardens with row after row of the same plant. While the mass of bloom is spectacular, the sameness of the texture when viewed lacks what a little variety would quickly provide. Our garden layouts should delight our eyes with many textures from leaf and bloom.
However, how do we keep all these textures from destroying the visual composition? If we just plant a spiked leaf beside a round leaf plant beside a tall plant beside a short plant and etc., then we may have a richly textured yard but one that overwhelms the eye and mind with a chaotic mix. Your eye doesn't know where to start looking nor does the eye find a visual path to guide us through the garden. The answer is pattern.
Within the second photo you see striking patterns typical of coleus. The scalloped reds make a strong textural statement. But the pattern created by the flowers becomes something else and something more. The pattern gives the eye a sense of order and pleases the viewer more than a red-leafed plant where the shapes and lines had nothing in common and randomly spread across the design.
Repetition and Grouping
Look at the third photograph, to the right, and see how repeating the red mass-planting of impatients across the yard visually ties those two parts of the garden together.
If we were to create one new flower bed after another and place them around the yard without any thought to repetition, the beds could individually be interesting but the whole garden view could also again be chaotic. The eye would see nothing to unify all these different flowers blooming in all these different beds scattered around the lawn. However, if you repeat a colorful texture in a few of the beds, then the beds begin to work together and you start to have a design, a unified composition. The repetition of that color, that flower, gives the eye a path and the mind begins to link one side of your garden layout with another. But repetition itself is not enough to make a design really successful. If you simply repeated planting the same striking colorful flower, your design would quickly get scattered and boring. Beyond repetition is grouping.
When you see a scene like the one at left, the fourth photograph, it is grouping that makes for an interesting and unified composition. If the red, white and green coleus leaves were scattered here and there down the alley, they would be much less interesting, less dramatic, than a large group of them together at the entrance.
See how the grouping makes the stone path a "path" and invites the eye as well as the feet. Too many times we feel that for a path to work it must be in a straight line. The meandering path in this garden is visually held together by the grouping of the similar shapes repeated one after another without the need for a straight line.
Also, the large groups of different hostas make a visual pathway as we move our attention from one group of color, shape and texture to another. These groupings make the view feel comfortable and approachable.
It is grouping that simplifies our views. When you look at a tree like the red-berried dogwood to the right, you don't see one leaf and then another leaf and on and on. You see a tree and the leaves all together give us the impression of a "tree". Look at the grouping of Black-Eyed Susans. The large grouping adds much more power to the landscape design than spreading just as many plants randomly around the yard.
Next issue we will continue our discussion of design. To receive EurekaEmail Gardening Newsletter, please subscribe by emailing us your name, postal address and email address along with instructions to subscribe you to the newsletter.