Landscape Design Principles

Home landscape designs vary according to family needs and preferences, but successful designs have certain underlying principles in common, including unity, balance, emphasis, scale, space, and lines. 

Unity

A landscape has unity when its predominant features have some visual characteristics in common. For example, plants with similar forms, colors, and textures can create unity, both on your lot and in your neighborhood. This is also true of lawns and paving materials. Repeating a design pattern, color, or texture in several different locations helps create unity. Planting beds and turf areas are very important to tie the landscape together and create a sense of unity. 

Balance

Plants and landscape structures of similar visual importance help create balance in a landscape design. With color, form, texture, size, and other features, you can direct attention to several areas of the yard. Balance may be symmetrical (formal), in which each side of the yard is similar in pattern, or asymmetrical (informal), in which each side attracts the same attention, even though objects and spacing are not repeated.

Emphasis

Accent areas or focal points to which attention is drawn create emphasis and keep a design’s unity and balance from becoming monotonous. A single contrast in color, texture, form, or height—such as that provided by a bench, tree, pool, or flowerbed—can provide emphasis. 

Scale

Scale refers to the size relationships among plants, structures, and open spaces. A four-foot-high shrub with a four-foot spread may be too large— and therefore out of scale—in front of low windows. However, next to a high-rise building, the same shrub would be out of scale because it is too small. In some home landscape situations, group plantings will compensate for plants with too little spread. 

Space

Your entire lot can be considered a block of space with dimensions of length, width, and height. Plants, fences, and buildings are used to divide the lot into smaller living spaces analogous to the rooms of your house. These outdoor “rooms” should have separate identities and should meet your use area needs. The rooms should have openings that direct movement from one to another. 

Lines

Lines may be straight or curved. Landscape designers frequently lay out patios, decks, and planting beds using straight lines that extend—or parallel—house and lot lines. Straight lines tend to create a more formal look for your landscape. Equally successful— and more naturalistic—designs can be created with curved lines. Loosely curved lines are easy to mow around and also provide a good flow through your landscape. 

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These design principles will help you shape the areas you identified in your general-use sketches. But you can’t design a landscape based only on the placement and size of plants and structures. The appropriate plants and construction materials must also be selected. 

Both plants and building materials can be selected for their form, texture, and color. Keep these elements of landscape composition in mind as you proceed toward your final landscape design.