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| Landscape Design Rules |
If you’re looking for garden design ideas, you’ve come to the right
place. Many companies compiled a collection of photos showing a variety of garden
styles to help get you started planning the garden you’ve always
dreamed about. The right plants and accessories can set the tone
for your ideal outdoor atmosphere- an invigorating escape or a relaxing
retreat. You can embark on this gardening adventure yourself, or you
can hire a landscape architect to help with advice. Either way, there're rules the designer respect to create a suitable design.
Rule 1: The House is the Most
Important Part of Any Garden.
You can’t ignore it! It’s almost
always the largest, most dominant structure in the garden. Your journey starts
and ends with the house and therefore any garden plan, should always start from
the building and work outwards.
Rule 2: The Designers Main Objective is to Link Building with Site.
Probably the most important rule of
all and yet the one that is least understood. This rule applies to any
landscape scheme, whether residential or commercial. If the design is to be
successful, then it must blend the building seamlessly into its environment. To
achieve this, the designer needs to be able to combine symmetry with biology,
i.e. architecture with landscape. Because most buildings are made from
geometric shapes and the garden is essentially a biological environment, great
care is needed to join these two opposing forms together. Try linking them too
quickly and they will clash, creating a meaningless amorphous squiggle where
the house looks like it’s just landed from space.
Rule 3 All shape close to the house should be Symmetrical.
This follows on from rule 2. Because
the building is predominantly made up of straight lines based on squares and
rectangles, the area around the building should copy these geometric,
mathematical shapes to help link the house with the garden. The terraces,
paths, formal pond and planting beds should be designed using straight lines.
If you don’t believe me, I will try
to convince you by using an interior design analogy. “You would not put an
amoebic shaped rug into a rectangular shaped room. Instead you would use a
geometrical rug/carpet.” The same rules of interior design are just a
relevant for outside design. The lawn is the carpet of the garden and the worst
thing you can do, is to put a wiggly edged lawn into a rectangular shaped
garden. Creating wiggles and squiggles won’t make your garden look natural.
Nature makes it natural! As soon as you add planting to a straight edged border
the plants grow and spill over and soften all the hard lines.
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| Landscape Design Rules |
Rule 4 Use a Grid to help you Design.
Because you want your garden to link
back to the house, it make sense to use shapes and pattern on your plan, that
relate back to the scale and proportion of the building. “The Scale of the
Grid is derived from the Mass of the Property”. Every grid is unique to
site. This may in reality appear subliminal, but using a grid which is
derived from the proportions and scale of the building means that all the
patterns you use for the garden plan, relate directly back to the house and the
grid also acts as a guide for the designer so they can quickly check size and
scale of different features.
Rule 5 There are No Rules.
This isn’t strictly true because I
have just given you a small sample of some. However you first need to
understand the rules of geometry and design before you can break them. If we
all stuck rigidly to rules, we would end up with some very dull design, but
conversely, few universities and colleges give any clear guidance to design
teaching, so that students graduate without a clear design philosophy.
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