First in the series article
Beautiful and Enjoyable Garden Design,
More than a Collection of Good Plants
Plan your garden to display stunning bloom as part of good garden design and reflect your own originality.
Design is design is design. Once you learn to use and learn to recognize good design, you apply it to all the visual parts of your life and especially in your flower and landscape gardens.
What is good design?
Pictured above is Tim Bell's garden, often photographed for its great garden design.
Design is the 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 its design just doesn't work. It would be like running out side and planting your new flowers wherever you spotted an empty 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. 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.
Preview
Over the next few months, we are going to look at gardening from a design standpoint. We will feature and illustrate different elements of design and methods of achieving compositional unity for each issue of the new Eureka Email Gardening Newsletter. If you do not now receive the email newsletter Email us and send us your name, postal address and email address and you'll receive your subscription soon. Following is a preview of the topics we'll cover over the next few months as part of the Eureka Email Gardening Newsletter:
Using Elements of Design as You Make a Unified Composition
Let's look at line and shape as elements of design and balance as a method of achieving compositional unity.
As we take out a pencil and sketch out the rows of a large garden or the beds surrounding a house, we use line to start our design. We soon finds ourselves defining shapes that make up the garden design we're developing.
When we first start approaching visual composition as curious kids with a camera, we seem to automatically want to symmetrically balance the scene. We'll frame the person in the middle of the picture every time. It's very soothing to our psyche to see things lined up and symmetrically balanced like the abstract Illustration A.
While symmetrical balance works great in production gardens or strict formal gardens, I find the appeal of an Asymmetrical arrangement of garden shapes more interesting. We all enjoy a meander around flowing perennial beds much more than a quick march through a straight alignment of garden beds symmetrically arranged around the house.
It is easy to imagine a symmetrical garden like Illustration E below. Asymmetrical balance isn't as exact as left matching right. Asymmetrical design will feel balanced either through a physical or psychological weighting of the lines and shapes in your composition.
For example, in Illustration B there is no bi-symmetry, left does not match right and neither does top match bottom. However, Illustration B does feel balanced even though the physical weights are not equal but rather feel balanced across the composition. Plus there is a great deal more visual interest in the composition with the eye moving around the design. More importantly, the composition works together -- it holds together.
Compare the previous illustration with this one using the same line and shape components. While these elements of design are almost identical, there is no compositional unity, no flow. It simply doesn't work. Your eye wanders from spot to spot and nothing holds your interest. And certainly nothing unifies the composition like the asymmetrical balancing of physical shapes like the previous illustration
Here we see that there is also psychological weight to an asymmetrical balance situation. While physically the composition is very right-sided heavy, it feels asymmetrically balanced due to the irresistible red circle. The circle's psychological weight is very heavy for viewers -- we can't resist looking at circles and when people look at red, the red jumps off the page. Thus the advertising industry uses both these ideas in its packaging design. Just look down a row of cereal boxes or cigarette packs at all the circles and red coloring. Asymmetrical balance depends on the physical balance of shapes as well as the impact of strongly appealing shape and color.
If you're going to lay out a new garden area in your yard, it is much more interesting to incorporate an asymmetrically balanced garden rather than a more typical symmetrical arrangement with flower beds lined up like soldiers left and right, front and back. Since we all seem to gravitate toward symmetrical balance too quickly, let's focus instead on designing an asymmetrically balanced garden area laid out with basic lines and shapes this month.
Let's look at a rectangular yard area this month that would be off to the side of a house -- an area possibly unused over the years except for maybe lawn.
Let's imagine that you want to expand your garden display space for those new iris and daylilies you're collecting this year and you must have more room. Here we see a symmetrical solution to turning a side yard into a combination of raised beds and lawn. While you would have plenty of flower beds space for new additions to your collection, the overall look would be rigid and uninteresting.
Look at the difference an asymmetrically balanced yard can make. Here the overall flower and lawn needs are met just as well as with the symmetrical design above but the design flows from one area to another.
You can imagine walking from one display bed and along the path to another as the walk explores and presents the flowers. Note that the lawn areas are about the same for both illustrations but now the design seems to work at both holding the visual organization together as well as please the eye and spirit with a flowing layout. In both cases, ample space has been left in the design for walkways and larger grassy areas in the yard for chairs and open spaces.
But don't think that you must have curving lines for your garden design. You can achieve the same asymmetrical balance with angular lines and shapes just as well.
In Illustration G, we have the same basic layout using Asymmetrical design but with a repetition of triangular shapes for our garden flower beds. While angular like the first illustration, this angular design offers a more intriguing and original approach as it unifies the entire yard with its asymmetrical balance making it all work together.
Also note that the garden beds could be of very different natures and the overall design would hold the visual layout together. What if the top bed was a water garden, as in Illustration H, instead of a raised bed.
While we all have seen how out-of-place a new lily pond can be if just thrown into a landscape, if the lines and shapes of your garden unify the overall composition in an asymmetrical balance the new pond will work with your landscape. Look at this photo of a water garden I'm currently working on to see how the lines and shapes of the raised flower beds and the water garden work together to unify the diverse garden components in this yard into a visually unified landscape design to be enjoyed throughout the seasons.
Next month we will look at value, color and form as our elements of design and dominance and alignment as our methods of achieving composition unity in our garden designs.
About the author:
Ken M. Gregory has a B.A. in studio art and English and an M.F.A. in design. He has taught art, English and photography as a high school and college instructor. For a dozen years he served as a college administrator whose department included graphic design, advertising and marketing. He is editor of Eureka Daylily Reference Guide and the new Eureka Iris Reference Guide.