More Graden design Principles - Keeping your Garden Design Simple and to Scale and Proportion

Think you understand the principle of Unity and Harmony now? Good. Let's look at a few more principles of Garden Design that you'd do well to remember - ooh, that sounds a bit menacing doesn't it? Sorry!!

Heard of the phrase -

"Less is More"?

Well, it applies to Garden Design too. Simplicity in your design will encourage a strong and successful design. Keeping a design simple isn't always easy, as once your creative juices are flowing you can be tempted to keep adding to your design. Knowing when to Stop though can really help you design a fantastic garden - and if you've lots of ideas that you couldn't use, offer to design a friends garden and use them there (so long as they fit with your friends brief!)

So, how do you keep a garden simple?

The easiest way is to keep monitoring your design and ask yourself if it is getting too busy. If there is so much going on that you don't know which way to turn then look at which elements you can do without, and find the courage to remove them. If you're having difficulty deciding whether to remove the sauna or the jacuzzi ask someone who will be using the garden with you what their opinion is. It's not worth spending hours agonising over so be sure to put the dilemma into perspective. Ensure that simplicity runs through your entire design - from the layout to the textures and colours.

One way of keeping a design simple is to use just a few types of plants and mass plant them. (Apologies for the quality of the photo, my camera was playing up!)

If you find you've got hundreds of juicy ideas flowing from you, don't just add them to your design willy-nilly, keep a sketch pad nearby and jot down your ideas there. That way you'll be able to take a step back and develop the best ideas that will work for your brief.

Another principle that is fundamentally important is

Scale and Proportion

You will need to consider three relationships when you think of scale and proportions. Firstly, the relationship between the house and the garden. Secondly, that of the garden and the surrounding landscape. Lastly, don't forget the relationship that you need to have with your garden.

As soon as you begin your design try to think three dimensionally. This will help focus your mind on how elements will relate to each other and hopefully you will see if something will be out of proportion to something else.

Take a photo of a particular feature in your garden that you are planning to keep. Lay tracing paper over it and experiment by drawing different design ideas, seeing how they relate to the original feature in size and proportion. If you're not confident at drawing it doesn't matter, nobody else needs to see your drawings, just keep practicing until you feel more relaxed with your style. If you're really struggling to get your ideas on to paper, then you might want to consider going to a local drawing class to gain experience.

You could even try making a model of your garden. It will need to be to scale so that you can tell if an idea is going to work but it can be made from any discarded items that you can find. Turn yourself into a Blue Peter presenter and do your bit for the environment by recycling old boxes and toilet rolls. Remember you're not trying to re-create the dolls house that you (or a female relative) had when you were young, it's merely another tool to examine the major elements of your design and see if the scale and proportion will work within the boundaries of your garden.

Whichever method you choose, include a correctly scaled person to your sketch or model. That will show you if your idea relates to the people that will be using your garden.

When you come to size up your major elements and feature, think of their practicalities and what you are wanting to use them for. Make sure that a patio planned for seating 12 people is large enough to take 12 people - and a planned Koi pond can accommodate Koi and not just little fish!

Consider also, the type and size of material that you use. Generally a smaller garden will suit having a smaller unit of paving which will give the impression of having more space. If you were to use small units of paving in a larger garden however, it may have the effect of looking too busy. Be careful if you are including steps in your garden. They will need to be the correction proportion to prevent accidents. Make the risers (the vertical bits) as shallow as possible, and the treads (the flat bit of the step) as wide as possible, ensuring that the steps are comfortable to use and safe.

You can use scale and proportion to emphasise and enhance the sense of space within a garden. Make small gardens that have little space from front to back feel longer and wider by using horizontal or diagonal features. Add elements that encourage people to walk side to side, thereby giving the illusion that the garden is longer than it is as it takes some time to reach the back. You can use individual paving slabs or bricks to make a garden appear wider too. Lay the longest length of the paving slab or brick cross ways on the path and if you want to exaggerate the width even more, consider staggering the edges of the path into the surrounding planting.

You can control the speed at which people use the paths in this way. Bricks laid length ways with make people walk faster whereas laid cross ways, the bricks will slow the user down.

You can alter perspectives in the garden by choosing carefully how you place certain features. Putting larger objects behind smaller ones will make the horizon appear closer to you, shortening the perspective of the garden as a whole. You can also play with parallel lines, which in reality, recede away from the viewer and appear to converge to a point on the horizon. By altering the lines you can make the distance look longer or shorter to suit your desired effect.

Have an experiment with the perspectives and proportions in your garden. Decide whether certain paths need to allow people to move quickly (maybe to a shed or gate) or whether you want them to meander (maybe through a nicely planted area). Try out some ideas and see what will work for you.