Backyard Landscape Design

Whether you’re new to gardening, or you’ve been honing your skills for years, the following design secrets will help you create a more effective and enticing garden.

The Graceful Sweep of a Curve
The Mystery of the Unseen
Pooling and Channeling
Capture the View Beyond
The Principle of Three Depths
Tricking the Eye
The Long View
Irresistible Lookouts

1. The Graceful Sweep of a Curve

The sweep of a curve lends a gracious air to a landscape. Your eye cannot help but follow it around. By laying out a plant bed or even a walkway in a strong, playful line you invite people to explore. And a curved flower bed combines color and shape to make a garden more enticing.

2. The Mystery of the Unseen

If you want to make a small outdoor space more interesting or appear larger, you can use an ancient Japanese design technique known as miegakure or ‘hide and reveal.’ This entails partially obscuring a view or features in a garden to create an illusion of distance. A half-hidden vista also encourages people to explore a space because the ‘mystery of the unseen’ is quite tantalizing. If you see only a partial view of a landscape you will invariably move forward to see what is ahead.

3. Pooling and Channeling

People move through space in the same way that water flows—it moves rapidly through a narrow channel and slows when it flows into a larger, wider pool. Similarly, people move faster in a narrow walk and slow down or pause when they arrive at an opening. Knowing this, you can use a design technique called, 'pooling and channeling,' to lead and direct people through a space.

4. Capture the View Beyond

In Japan, they use a design technique called ‘borrowed scenery’ to make a small outdoor space more interesting. They incorporate a view of a feature, large or small, that lies beyond the garden to carry the eye out. You can ‘borrow’ a view of a distant building, mountain or just a neighbor’s nearby pine tree or crabapple.

5. The Principle of Three Depths

We all know the words ‘foreground’ and ‘background’ but have you heard of ‘middle ground?’ It separates the front from rear and is essential for a compelling view. This is called ‘The Principle of Three Depths' and is used in Asian landscape painting.

6. Tricking the Eye

In a long perspective view, the lines of a walk seem to converge, the farther away they travel, the closer they become. This visual cue creates a sense of depth in any outdoor space. You can use this trick in a small outdoor space by slightly angling the lines of a walk inward, making it appear longer than it actually is. You can do this also with a plant bed or pergola. The key is to angle it in very slightly to appear as a natural perspective.

7. The Long View

Long, straight views inexorably lead the eye and you cannot help but follow its line to the end. Therefore, grab the lengthiest straight line you can in an outdoor space and use it to its best advantage.

8. Irresistible Lookouts

A lookout is one of the most exciting areas in a landscape. Elevated locations such as the top of a slope, a rock or a bridge, can serve as a ‘prospect’ where we can stop and enjoy a view. It seems to be a universal urge to climb a hill and look out from a high point upon the scene below.

Hopefully the tips and design of the modern Landscape Backyard can be your inspiration, thus helping to embrace the Backyard Landscape Design, and thank you.