Landscaping Designs
Some people refer to a lawn as the picture frame for landscaping designs. A beautiful lawn will showcase a beautiful landscape in the best possible light. When you spend a lot of time creating the healthiest lawn possible, you will want to adorn the lawn with well-tended landscape beds. There are some key design principles to keep in mind when selecting landscaping plants and landscaping rocks for planting beds. If you can remember these three main principles-and apply them equally to choices of landscaping plants and landscaping rocks, you will have a beautiful garden.Basic Elements of Design
There are three different elements of design you need to understand in order to create beautiful landscaping designs. These design elements can be applied to all elements of the landscape, including plants, hardscape (sidewalks, patios and curbs), landscaping rocks, edging, and furniture. Anything that is part of the landscape should be carefully considered for their design element characteristics, to ensure that you have a balanced, beautiful landscape.Landscaping Design: Color
Color is reflected in landscaping plants, rocks, gravel, and furniture. Plant leaves and flowers should both be considered for their colors. Some plants, particularly perennials and grasses, are used mostly for their leaf colors, not their flowers. Elephant ear, ornamental grass, caladium, and coleus are all selected for leaf color. Annual flowers that bloom all summer are selected for flower color. Zinnias, annual vinca, petunias, geraniums, lantana, and salvia are flowers that bloom all summer. Thus, their flower colors must be considered carefully as part of the landscape design. When considering color in the garden, you need to think about the hue of the color. Do you want to use warm colors or cool colors? Planting cool colors adds depth to the garden, because cool colors appear further away than they actually are. Warmer colors come to the forefront of a garden design. Mixing warm and cool colors will make the garden or landscape look more dimensional, and deeper than it is.Cool Colors and Warm Colors
Warm colors appear closer than they actually are, and cool colors appear further away. Warm colors include: red, orange, yellow, pink, and fuchsia. Cool colors include blue, green, and purple. White is more or less a neutral color, but it is jarring to the eye. It must be used repetitively in order to tie the garden together, not break it up.Texture
Landscaping plants, landscaping rocks and furniture texture are also an important factor in landscape design. Contrast of textures, as well as contrast of color and form are what makes landscaping design interesting. If the whole landscaping bed is filled with plants that look alike, even if they are not the same plant, the bed will be boring, and will blend in to the surroundings, or be unnoticeable. To make an interesting design, you need to mix up smooth textures and fine textures. The contrast of a very fine grass and the wide, smooth leaves of cabbage would be striking and interesting.Form
The last element of design is plant form. Form is the overall shape of the rock, plant or piece of furniture. Different forms include upright and linear, prostrate and sprawling, rounded, pyramidal, oval, columnar, square and more. As with color and texture, to prepare a uniform, pleasing landscape design requires repetition of form, even if the plants, rocks or furniture are not the same. A fountain shape could be repeated with Zelkova trees, ornamental grasses, and false indigo. Plants like Italian cypress, lilies and gladiolus are columnar. Cotoneaster, daylilies, hosta, some dogwood trees and cherry trees have a strong horizontal shape.Texture, Color and Form Together in the Garden
The combination of color, texture and form together in balance create a restful place for the eyes. The picture of the arid garden was taken at the Ruth Bancroft garden in San Francisco. The principles apply across all landscaping zones, landscaping plants and landscaping designs.
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