A lot of people ask what rules they should follow to develop a great landscape design. I’ve put together a list of 21 rules based on my experience and background in landscape architecture.
To create a beautiful & unique landscape design, regardless of your situation, you want to:
- List what you want to include in your garden/yard
- Find your sites “problems“
- Find your sites “opportunities“
- Look beyond your borders
- Learn to take ideas from unexpected places
- Articulate how you want to use a space
- Articulate how a space should look
- DON’T draw random lines to create spaces in your yard
- DO use your surroundings to help “shape” your design
- Use objects around you to determine suitable dimensions
- Iterate – explore an idea or design further
- Iterate again – don’t settle for your first design
- Minimise your colour and material palette
- Don’t be scared to design and dream bigger than you can ‘do’ right now
- Make sure each area/space in your design “works” for you
- Choose plants and materials suitable for your conditions
- Get local expert help where you need it
- Plant in odd numbers
- Spend your money where it counts
- Have multiple plant, material, layout & construction options
- Know when to break the rules!
Following these concepts will ensure your landscape design suits your house, your preferred style, your local conditions and, most importantly, your wants and needs.
Let’s have a look at each rule in more detail.
Feature Image: Design by Ground Studio Landscape Architecture as part of Butterfly House by Feldman Architecture. Image from archdaily.com
1. List What You Want To Include In Your Yard
The easiest way to get started is to define what you want to include in your garden or backyard. I break most things you could think of into three categories:
- Activities – things you want to DO in the yard. Something you leave the house for. You physically occupy the space to “use” it.
- Features – things you SEE in the yard. Something that is visually appealing. You don’t need to be ‘in’ it to “use” it.
- Miscellaneous Ideas – things that don’t quite fit the other two. They might be little tricks or hacks that can help bridge two different spaces.
Write down a list of all the different things you want to do, see and include in your design. This helps narrow your focus.
It’s not a finalised list. It should be fluid, changing as you find new things you want to include, and remove old things as you go.
2. Find Your Garden‘s “Problems”
This is done through site analysis (learn a basic approach in my 6 Step Beginner’s Guide).
You look at your surroundings – weather, the ground you’re working with, buildings and existing elements on your site – and note some of the troublesome, tricky areas. Some common problems could be:
- A steep slope
- A low, wet area
- Shady space where nothing grows
- Area exposed to strong wind or sun
Making notes of some of the problem areas in your yard helps define them clearly. When you understand a problem, it’s easier to research and find a solution.
3. Find Your Garden’s “Opportunities”
Just like problems, you can find opportunities in your yard through site analysis. To find your real opportunities, you need to ignore where you think activities or features should go and look at favourable conditions in your yard.
If you get lovely sunshine down the side of your house, think about what activities or features from your list you could ‘fit‘ there. Or maybe a shaded area becomes a place to escape and relax, hidden from view.
Sometimes you might find ways to extend an existing element into an area that has favourable conditions for when you want to use it. Like extending a deck into a spot that enjoys late afternoon sunlight.
You won’t notice them all at once, but actively looking for opportunities may help you discover spaces for things you had previously rejected from your list.
4. Look Beyond Your Yard’s Borders
As you work through a little site analysis, consider not just what is inside your property boundaries, but also what’s in neighbouring areas.
You may find a number of problems you have to deal with – like neighbours looking into your garden. Or opportunities you can take advantage of – a lovely view of a tree, plants, garden or building.
Sometimes this is the cheapest way to make a space pretty. Provide an opportunity for a feature outside your garden to enhance yours.
5. Learn To Take Landscaping Ideas From Unexpected Places
Many people fall into the trap of treating inspiration and ideas as solutions to problems. You have a problem – you need ‘something’ down the side of your house – so you look only for ‘side-of-the-house’ ideas.
In reality, you can take ideas for any space, from any space.
Try to describe what you like about the piece of inspiration you have and see if you can copy those points into your current area.
Sometimes the best spaces are created by stealing a concept from somewhere else. It could be a combination of shapes, colours or materials. Or the contrast between these things.
I’ve developed a way of “unpacking” ideas from any source in what I call my Idea Generator “Cheat Sheets”. If you’d like a free copy of this, click through to learn more and sign up for the occasional email I send through.
6. Articulate How You Want To Use An Area In Your Yard
As you work through a few different ideas, think about how YOU would use the space. For example, if you want to design a vegetable garden, think about how much area you will actually need.
Don’t just assume you should have 3 x 30 sq ft vegetable beds because you saw it somewhere else. Consider the amount of time you are willing to dedicate to this activity. And what kind of vegetables, fruits and herbs you are likely to grow and use.
The better you can write down and define how you personally (and your family) want to use an area, the better it will meet your needs.
7. Articulate How An Area Should look
Similar to how you use it, try to define how you want it to look.
This doesn’t necessarily mean the exact materials you will choose. It’s more about the colours, shapes, finishes and combinations of those things.
So rather than knowing the specific plants in the garden bed above, I can note some of the things I like about it that I’d like to emulate in my design.
- The strong ‘star’ shapes of the plants at the front
- The contrast between them and the softer plants around them
- How they seem to ’emerge’ from within those plantings
- The floating spiky heads of the plants behind – giving a bit of vertical layering
- The contrast between those spiky heads and the soft feathers of the grass next to it
- The weathered, twisted look of the small tree growing to the right
- The pops of red and pink within the predominantly green, tan and grey garden bed
Note I didn’t have to really ‘know’ what any of the plants were. I just need to outline what I like about the image. Similes – I want something “like” that – is the way to think about it.
As you’ll see later, you can take these points to a local expert who can help find suitable options to match these points.
8. DON’T Draw Random Lines To Create Spaces In Your Yard
Another common mistake people make when trying to begin a design.
I call this kind of approach painting. And while it can sometimes work, it generally leads to a design that completely ignores the unique elements of your garden and site.
You can use this essentially arbitrary approach in smaller doses – perhaps for less important areas like the outline of a garden bed, or the layout of plants within one.
Try to not to start your entire landscape design by drawing random lines. Instead, follow the next rule.
9. DO Use Your Surroundings To Help “Shape” Your Design
When starting your designs, take the edges and midlines of walls, windows and doors and draw straight lines out into the yard.
You shouldn’t try to use every line, but having them there helps you create boundaries and carve up spaces. Instead of having a random width for a garden bed, try to align the edge with one of these ‘regulating lines’.
And it’s not just your house that can help shape spaces. You can look at neighbouring elements like buildings or trees. Or large elements on your own property.
Sometimes the best way to define a space is using site conditions. Slopes, flat areas, certain existing materials all could define one area. Or maybe ephemeral conditions like sunlight and shade could help partition areas.
The point is, use your surroundings – both physical and environmental – to help determine edges and transitions from space to space.
10. Use Objects Around You To Determine Suitable Dimensions For Your Garden
You’ll find, as you refine things, that you have no real idea how big or small, narrow or wide, something should be. The easiest way to at least get in the right ballpark is to look at the existing world around you.
Everything around you has been designed to suit the needs of (most) people. That means a the height of a seat for a chair falls within a pretty standard range – probably 15 – 20″ (38 – 50 cm). Same for the depth of a chair – 26 – 32 inches (70 – 80 cm).
If you’re unsure about how long, tall, wide, narrow or deep something should be, look at physical things in your house. Doorways, benches, seats, corridors etc. are often designed to standard sizes. You can use these as a base for your own design, and tweak to suit your needs.
11. Iterate – Explore A Landscape Idea Or Design Further
Iteration is the act of redoing something, but changing it slightly in response to feedback.
So when you come up with a landscape layout or plan you like, redraw it and change things around a little. It might only be one or two things – swap spaces around, or change the layout of walls or benches.
Take what you have done and alter things slightly to see what happens. If you don’t like the newer version, that’s fine. It’s just a drawing, and you still have the first version to work with again.
The core of good landscape design is iteration. Keep exploring.
12. Iterate Again – Don’t Settle On Your First Garden Design
Just in case you didn’t get the message, keep exploring, keep iterating.
It’s easy to settle on the first design you like. Or, heaven forbid, the first design you do. This is not real design.
Good garden design relies on eliminating bad options. And the only way to eliminate the bad is to actually draw them and explore them. Then you can determine why they don’t work.
It may be this design doesn’t fit all the things you want to include. Or places some of them in bad positions – too dark or too small. Or perhaps you can’t make the material or colour palette work across all the spaces.
Basically, if I ask you why you put your vegetable garden here and not there – and you can’t give me an answer – you haven’t fully explored all options. Take the time to iterate, explore, swap and change everything in your design.
When you’ve done this properly, you can point to your chosen garden design and say, definitively, this one is the best.
13. Minimise Your Colour And Material Palette In Your Garden Design
To help you when starting, try to develop a set of colours or material choices that you stick to.
Just like styling a room in your house, having a limited palette keeps things tidy. And allows you to ‘break’ from this palette in certain specific instances.
An easy way to start is to think about your preferred garden style and look up inspiration and examples of it.
Take a few materials and colour combinations from them, and add them to the existing ones on your house or property. Then you have a set of colours and materials (and maybe material finishes) that you can design around.
14. Don’t Be Scared To Dream Bigger Than You Can ‘Do’ Right Now
So right now you may not have the funds or time to complete your best or favourite landscape design. That’s OK.
The best thing about a design is it can be a plan. A roadmap for how you get from here to there. And like all journeys, they can take time.
Knowing how much things will cost, and what materials you need, allows you to save money and build your garden in stages.
This means even if you’re broke right now, you can still design the garden of your dreams. You know what you want to build, and roughly how much it will take to get there. You just have to recognise it will take time to make it come to life.
15. Make Sure Each Area In Your Yard “Works” For You
As your designing your garden or backyard, you want to check that each area you design allows you to do what you want to do in it.
So if you want a lawn to play with kids or pets, try to figure out an approximate minimum size you want so you can do this. Then, as you design, make sure you aren’t creating plans with lawns smaller than that.
It can work in the other direction as well. Again, if you are a casual gardener, don’t design acres of garden beds you need to spend hours maintaining.
Think about how you use each area, how much time you will spend in it, and how much effort you want to put into maintaining it.
Try to design things that meet your needs and don’t force additional chores onto you. That’s how people come to resent the lovely, but too large, houses they purchase and spend all their time cleaning. Don’t fall into that trap.
16. Choose Plants And Materials Suitable For Your Site Conditions
This one is pretty obvious, but is helped by rules 7 & 13.
If you can describe how you want something to look – the colours, materials, combinations and contrasts – you can find options that tick those boxes, yet may be better suited to your location.
They don’t necessarily have to be native or local options, but they should be able to handle the kinds of conditions – especially the extreme conditions – your site experiences.
This saves you money and time – you buy something that will survive, and spend less time maintaining it.
17. Get Local Experts To Help Choose Appropriate Options For Your Design
This ties into the previous rule. Describing or showing experts what you want can help them determine suitable options for your specific needs and location.
And it’s not just about material and plant choices.
Designers or landscapers could outline the best construction practices – how things are generally prepared and sequenced. This might change your design layout, or perhaps which order you choose to build things.
Running your garden design/s by experts is a great way to refine your design, making it more robust and more likely to work.
18. Plant In Odd Numbers
An oldie but a goodie!
If you are mass planting one plant, try to group it in odd numbers. 3, 5, 7 and 9 generally look more appealing than even sets. This matters less as you get into the teens and twenties, but for smaller numbers, odd works better.
This is useful when it comes to adding the finishing touches to a design and you need to figure out how many plants you need to cover a specific space. If given the choice, go for more than you technically need, and an odd number.
19. Spend Your Money Where It Counts
Another common mistake people make is to design and build little parts of their yard separately – as little projects.
The problem with this approach is you not only design spaces in isolation, where they’re less likely to work together, but you end up spending more money per project than you would as a full design.
When you do have a final design you want to build (or have someone build for you) you are better able to allocate resources (time and money) to the areas that matter most.
You can splash out on the nice paving stones, and perhaps cut back on some of the expensive plant choices in a low visibility or low traffic area.
Or opt to buy larger, more mature plants, because you’re saving money in another area of your design.
All of this is easier to cost and figure out with a full design. And works especially well when we consider our final rule.
20. Have Multiple Plant, Material, Layout Or Construction Options For Your Garden Design
One you have a design you want to build, take the time to research (online or with experts) multiple options for as many parts of your design as you can.
Take particular care to try and find multiple options at different prices points.
As I said in the previous rule, having a full design gives you the ability to adapt to changes. It might be funds increasing or decreasing. Or discoveries – during the build! – that prevent you from constructing something how you’d planned.
If you have multiple options available to fall back on, you know that you can quickly pivot from one option to another. Not only that, but you can be confident that this new choice will work with your design aesthetically.
21. Know When To Break The Rules!
Although the rules listed above will help you create something amazing, they’re not mandatory. You’re free to break the rules when you think it works.
If you arbitrarily placed something in your design, and it holds everything together, keep it!
If you want a riot of colours and shapes because it matches your personality, go for it!
Like the best artists, if you understand the basics and rules above, when you break them, it’s by choice, not through ignorance. And that often makes the difference.
So there you go. Follow these 20 rules and you’re sure to create a unique, and well tested, landscape design. Something that can adapt to whatever changes life throws at you.
