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Great Gardens Come With Planning
What makes a great garden?
There are many ingredients, among them, flair, imagination, skill, know-how, and above all, good planning. Your garden should be a haven, an easy pleasant place to enjoy life. Even more than that, a good garden can add up to 30% to the value of your property. It is worth taking the time to think about what you want and do the research and planning that will enable you to achieve it.
Before you race outside and whack in that deck or patio, sit down and think about how you live and what you want to do in your garden. Consider all the people in your household. Children need space to run, play and ride trikes. But keep in mind that they’ll grow fast and their needs will change. Your garden has to be adaptable. Pets need their space too. Are you keen gardeners who enjoy caring for plants, or are you busy with other things and want a garden that functions well and looks good with the minimum of fuss. Does there need to be room for a boat or teenagers’ cars? Do you like playing in your garden? – chess, petanque, a putting green are all possible. Should there be a swimming pool? Do you need outdoor entertaining spaces or a vegetable plot? Make a wish list of everything you want to achieve. Make a need list too – this is a list of such basic things as clothesline and wheelie-bin storage. The need list makes sure you don’t leave the more boring requirements out.
Once you have identified everything you want and need it is time to start designing. This is the time to assess your own abilities. Good professional designers have genuine creative talent coupled with practical experience. They are trained to see pitfalls as well as possibilities that might not occur to you. Even though a professional designer might seem an expensive outlay at first, they usually save you money in the long run, and certainly can give you more ‘bangs for your buck’ in imaginative wow factor that need not cost the earth. But let’s say you decide to design your own space. There are certain basic design principles that are easy to learn and apply. Follow them and you are sure to make a garden that suits you perfectly.
There are two aspects to garden design. One is the hard landscaping; decks, paths, patios, walls, fences and pergolas, steps and all other built features. The other is the plants and decorative items that bring the hard landscaping to life. Whether your garden is a new bare canvas, or old and shabby, it is the hard landscaping that will set the scene for everything else. The prettiest planting in the world struggles to overcome the shabbiness of broken concrete, uneven bricks and rotting timber, or meanly proportioned inefficient new structures. The hard landscaping is the most costly part of your garden but getting it right will make the greatest difference to your enjoyment of your space.
Garden design is about the organisation of space. Just as the layout of a room or the arrangement of rooms in a house is important to its appeal, the layout or shape of a garden is vital to its success. It should look beautiful and inviting. It should function smoothly so you move from one part to another easily and logically. The shape of a garden is not simply a flat layout. Just as a room has walls, a ceiling, furniture, so does a garden. The walls might be solid walls or fences, or plants in the form of trees, hedges and shrubs. The ceiling might be the sky, a pergola or the canopy of a tree. Furniture can be decorative elements like pots or sculptures as well as practical ones like seats. The floor of your garden could be decking, paving, lawn or all three. Paths and steps are like corridors linking the various parts.
Design Principles
Unity
There should be an underlying unity to your garden design. It comes from considering all the parts in relation to one another and having a consistent theme throughout the garden. The theme could come from the planting style e.g. sub-tropical or lush native, or it could be related to the style or period of the house. It could be a more contrived theme such as French Provincial or Balinese Hideaway (although beware! copying an overseas style usually looks corny and out of place.) Or it could come from the consistent use of hard landscaping materials. Once you have decided upon your fence, deck or paving materials stick with your choice and avoid the fruit salad look. Being consistent with your hard landscaping materials has other advantages. It is easier to build and get a good finish, especially in those tricky corners where different materials meet. And it is easier to calculate and buy the materials you need without wastage.
Looking for examples ? - Try our Landscaping Design Principles Guide
Repetition and Harmony
One way to achieve unity is by repetition. Don’t be afraid to repeat what works. It is one of the most useful tricks in the book. This is a case of “More is more”. Doing one thing well and repeating it makes it look as if you know what you are doing. It reduces clutter and helps you achieve simplicity and elegance. The happy relationship of the different materials (both plants and hard landscape materials) creates harmony.
Looking for examples ? - Try our Landscaping Design Principles Guide
Contrast
Just as a relationship can be spiced up by a little friction, a garden needs a little contrast to prevent perfect harmony being perfectly boring. A garden full of soft rounded shapes needs a spike here and there to stop it looking doughy. A garden that is all spikes would be a very restless place. Contrast can be achieved by using different textures. The softness of grass or gravel contrasts well with hard concrete or paving.
Looking for examples ? - Try our Landscaping Design Principles Guide
Balance and Proportion
As well as balancing harmonious and contrasting elements in your garden you are looking for an overall balance between open spaces (voids) and bold solid forms (masses). The open spaces often equate to the ‘floor’ of the garden. They could be paving, decks, lawn, water, low planting or simply sunny spaces surrounded by shady ones. The masses could be buildings, big dark-foliaged trees, solid fences or deep shadows. Too much space can make you feel lost, and too little is claustrophobic. A well-balanced garden has good proportions. You can use design tricks to improve bad proportions. For example a long skinny space can be divided into two or three different areas making it look shorter and wider and better proportioned.
Looking for examples ? - Try our Landscaping Design Principles Guide
Line
See a strong line and you’ll look along it. That means you can use line to draw the eye into the garden and from one part of it to another. In gardens the line could be the neat edge of a bed, a path, hedge or wall. Lines can be horizontal or vertical, curved or straight, with each causing a different reaction in the viewer. Zigzags suggest urgent movement. They work well in modernist gardens. Long gentle curves are elegant and restful. Wiggly lines cause an uncomfortable sensation of not knowing where to look, and suggest that the designer couldn’t decide either. Avoid them. Straight lines get you right to the point. And if there isn’t a practical destination there should be something else to stop the eye – a focal point. This is the spot for a bold pot, sculpture, plant or folly. If you want you can fool the eye by tapering a straight or curved path to make it seem longer than it really is.
Looking for examples ? - Try our Landscaping Design Principles Guide
Materials
There is a wealth of products available for hard landscaping these days, from high-end luxury materials to simple functional materials that will quietly carry a good design into successful reality. Basically we can consider materials for floors, patios, paths and decks; and materials for walls, including retaining walls. The materials divide into timber products, poured concrete products, concrete pavers and wall blocks, stone, brick, and various pebbles and gravel products. Each has its place and in your design you will have thought about what materials to use to achieve the look and function you want. In making your decision think about your house and other structures on the property. What materials are they made of? How will your design compliment what is already there? Are there other considerations such as damp shady conditions or exposed coastal conditions that would affect your choice of materials?
A wooden villa can sit comfortably behind a pretty picket fence but a modern block wall would suit neither the period nor the materials of the building. Similarly, block walls are far more elegant around a modern rendered masonry house than basic paling fences, especially if they are finished and painted in keeping with the house. If a paling fence is all the budget runs to, allow for buying climbing plants to dress it up or conceal it. Corrugated metal fences have a long tradition in New Zealand and they can adapt to several styles, be it funky modernism, colourful kitsch or traditional kiwiana.
Gardens on sloping sections usually call for some sort of retaining. Keep your walls low to avoid resource and building consent issues. Check with your local council to find out what the rules are. Retaining walls that carry a load such as a driveway will always need consent and stringent specifications. All retaining walls need drainage in order to work properly, and if you live an area with heavy clay soils this is the time to consider improving the drainage throughout your garden. Drainage should be connected to storm water Timber retaining walls built of treated pine should give a good twenty years of service. Block or concrete walls are heavier and need solid footings. Weak foundations lead sooner or later to cracks, bulges and a failed wall. There are crib-walling systems in both timber and concrete. Crib walls usually call for planting to hide them. It is a dry challenging environment for most plants but there are many successful and attractively planted crib walls around. Raised gardens can be built of macrocarpa, treated pine or concrete blocks. They are perfect for growing vegetables.
Careful selection of suitable materials for the ‘floor’ of your garden will add to its usability and appearance. Timber decks are softer on the eyes and feet. The lines of the decking create strong patterns that lead the eye or alter the perceived proportions of the deck. Timber is less successful in damp shady spots where it will soon grow mouldy and slippery, although there are products to clean it. It is a natural in coastal gardens where it suggests boardwalks and boat decks, and bleaches to a soft silver that blends perfectly with seaside colours. Pine decking needs to be treated and there are now several processes. Hardwood decking is more expensive, ideally more hardwearing, and should always be sourced from sustainable forests (not always an easy thing to be sure of). There are some new composite decking materials that look like wood on the market too.
Your choice of concrete product for paving may depend on existing concrete surfaces. A concrete driveway is a dominant feature and its finish may determine the rest of your paving choices. For example an exposed aggregate concrete driveway would suggest paths in a similar concrete and patio pavers that blend in with this. Or maybe you could introduce a clay brick trim to your path and lead on to a brick patio. There are many possibilities. Tinted concretes and pavers with strong dark or terracotta colours call for careful use and restrained consistent handling. Don’t introduce too many other colours and materials or you end up with a mish-mash.
Concrete pavers and decking are natural companions in many gardens and an effective way of breaking up the garden into well-proportioned spaces and indicating different functions or different degrees of formality. The ‘soft’ hard materials, shell, pebbles and gravel, contribute their textures. They can be in-fills in a much-used patio or path, and the main material in a less formal or less used path.
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