Garden landscape design contains and magnifies the power of organic vitality through controlled cultivation of organic forms. It works to compliment the architecture of the home and other outdoor structures, and it serves as a unifying force between the natural and manmade.
The first step in garden landscape design is choosing the best location for a garden. The area chosen must be one which looks look in relation to the house. Not only should the garden offer a pleasing site to people looking through their windows into their yard, but it should also visually compliment the home from any vantage point within the yard itself. The area selected should also be one that helps fill empty space in the yard with a more robust, expressive, and dynamic sense of color and life.
Typically such places include areas around fountains, outdoor buildings, patios, fence lines, and architectural walls. Some of the larger, more formal garden designs, such as Parterre Gardens, can be used to center an entire portion of the landscape, or even serve as the key organic focal point around which all other landscape design elements are developed.
The style of garden landscape design is determined by two things: geometric form and intentional theme. Because the home occupies the central position of importance on the property, it is essential to begin every residential landscape project with a systematic analysis of home architecture.
No matter how traditional or how eclectic a house appears, its architecture is nonetheless comprised of the same basic geometric shapes that occur everywhere else in the world. It is only a matter of degree and combination of these shapes that differentiates one home from the other.
The garden landscape design professional isolates these shapes and plants vegetation in corresponding shapes and patterns. These forms can either directly reflect architectural geometry, or they can compliment it with correlative counterpunctual designs.
Another factor that weighs heavily on our choice of style is the intended theme of the landscape master plan. If we want to create an abstract, conceptual theme, we will install a contemporary or modern garden. If we are looking to create a sense of relaxation, we may build a Zen garden or Japanese water garden.
Formalism is best supported by traditional garden designs, such as French, Italian, and English Garden. Mediterranean and Tropical styles can be used to add a sense of the romantic or the exotic to the landscape, and custom gardens consisting of blended elements from multiple styles can establish a strong eclectic tone in the landscape.
The heart and soul of garden landscape design is the plant material itself. Most gardens feature a blended presentation of greenery and color. Greenery must vary in shade in order to avoid looking flat and two dimensional.
A much more desirable aesthetic is "layering" lighter shades of green into darker tones. To achieve this, we use a wide range of shrubs species, ground cover species, and special grasses that vary in tone from an almost lime-colored green to a dark green that virtually appears black under certain lighting condition.
This layered greenery forms the foundational aesthetic for the garden to which white and other colors can then be added in measures appropriate to the style we have chosen. Some designs, such as the Parterre Garden, consist almost entirely of shrub species and use no flowering plants at all.
Others, like the English knot garden, use herb species that create different spectrums of color at seasonal intervals. Still others, like the traditional French and Italian Gardens, allow for considerably more creative license in the liberal use of color.
In order for your garden landscape design to contribute the maximum aesthetic possible to your property, it is necessary to work with a professional landscaping firm that can develop your garden in proper relationship to surroundings landscape elements such as pools, hardscapes, courtyards, and outdoor buildings. This will ensure a harmonious blend of the inorganic and the organic features of your landscape that provide you with a framework for a superb Houston outdoor living experience.
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