It is always fun to get the creative juices flowing. You get that sense of starting an endeavor and anticipate how things will turn out. Your mind just starts whirl with ideas until some image flashes together with a definitive click.
This, they say, is how advertising or fashion works. Why not landscaping? Like any other creative activity, residential landscaping also provides the same rush and excitement to discover what it is you can do to make a place more beautiful. If anything, landscaping is just another artful way of expressing yourself.
Residential landscaping has so many possibilities. To start with, you can try designing a single portion of your garden. Starting with a simple, basic idea is the easiest way to do this. Later, when you take a look at your handiwork, that simple idea may expand to envelope your whole garden. Landscaping is so wide open an art that learning in this field can be never-ending.
When you begin, start with the essentials for your garden; the plants. Work your way up from ground covering plants, small shrubs, flowers and trees. Where do you want to put these things? Or maybe you can start better with objects put in first. How about a garden path leading to a gazebo? What about installing a pond and several benches?
The next thing you have to do is to put your ideas on paper. You don't have to be an expert at drawing to do this. You can use squares, circles, rectangles and triangles as symbols to represent each item in your garden. The important part isn't the way you draw. When you put things down on paper, things start to look more concrete... figuratively speaking, of course.
Now that you have a diagram of sorts, what do you think will look best in that portion of your garden? If you have a small rectangular space next to a wall, measure that space and select the plants that would fit. The most common rectangular plot arrangements are 3 to 4 rows of plants. The first row will be ground cover, the second row will be small plants, third can be medium sized flowering plants while the back row near the wall can be tall flowering plants like hibiscus. With this kind of arrangement, all plants are visible.
Don't let limits guide the way you think. For example, if you have a rectangular area, it doesn't mean that everything has to be linear. You can have a small circular fountain or bird bath in the middle of the plot. From the circular form of the fountain, you can draw straight lines outward. Think of drawing the sun and its rays. The rays can be used as dividers or boundaries that will give you small triangular shaped plots. In each plot, you can plant different species of plants.
Take this for example. You can place chives, cherry tomatoes, thyme, tansy, yarrow and foxgloves into each of the small triangles. You can place brick dividers over the imaginary lines to separate the plots from each other. In this example, the space within the plot is divided asymmetrically yet still comes across as an orderly arrangement. Also, the visual experience changes depending on the angle the viewer is looking from.
As with any task that has to do with designing, the possibilities are limitless. All you have to do is use your imagination and set it down on paper. Let your enthusiasm do the rest.
Birdhouses
