Do you believe you’re not creative? That you have no artistic ability or talent? And are therefore not capable of designing your own garden or backyard?
Even if you’re not a creative genius, there are steps you can follow to unleash your artistic abilities – however tiny or dormant they are. It starts with consciously pushing past what you think makes ‘sense‘. And start to explore things that don’t.
In my experience, all creative types start in places that make no sense, before creating ‘something from nothing’ – a new combination of things never before seen.
In this post I want to help you find new ways to create something from nothing. Not necessarily things the world has never seen – just something you didn’t believe you were capable of. Something ‘you’ haven’t seen.
I won’t go into detail finding ideas – I cover that elsewhere – but I do want to expand upon how you really push them. Stretch them. Explore them properly. Let’s have a look.
Getting Creative –
Really Exploring Garden Ideas
One thing to do when exploring ideas is to push them. Treat them like dough and stretch, push, roll, knead and generally mould them into weird and crazy shapes.
Instead of just cutting and pasting an idea from an image into your space, or design, you take the time to really push it. So you can see how much your surroundings can influence it. How your context changes it, while still maintaining the essence of the idea.
As you look for inspiration (and remember, it is all around you), you will find some ideas that you really like. Even as you work through the landscape design process it’s tempting to stumble upon a layout or space you really like, and think your job is done. I’m fond of suggesting you need to move beyond what you like – go from good to best.
But the question is, how do you do it?
How Do I Push Boundaries?
The answer is easy to say, but harder to do. It involves asking yourself some questions. Every time you analyse some design work you’ve done. Or drawn an idea you just thought of. Or finished a design, or smaller space, and want to explore it in other ways. Ask yourself:
What happens if I…?
Let’s say you have an idea for an activity, feature or other space using water. Maybe it’s a small thin pond.
It ticks your criteria boxes and works with the local site and weather conditions. You think you’re job is done! That you can move on!
Normally, you can. But to get really creative – to push those boundaries and help you open your mind, ask yourself that question.
What happens if I?
I what?
Well, this is where we step away from common sense. Or even basic sense. Start to take the components in this space and bend them, push them, have them make no sense.
I don’t mean completely ignore reality. Gravity still exists. But you can ignore more mundane constraints for now. Money. Ability to build it (if you want to DIY). Availability of materials.
Let all of those thoughts go and ask yourself questions about the items in this space. You’ll see they tend to follow similar patterns. You just apply them to different things.
For this pond, what happens if you:
Expand the pond?
Flood the area?
Make the pond vertical?
Make it stepped or staggered?
Add other elements – vegetation or animals?
Maybe instead of a pond, it’s a large open area. You’re first idea is a lawn, but you want to try something different. What happens if you:
Use a groundcover plant?
Use a combination of rocks/pebbles etc?
Invert it? Have planting strung above the space instead?
Flood it?
Raised Lawn Garden Bed?
Crazy Questions? No, But Crazy Outcomes.
The questions themselves aren’t crazy at all. But I bet if you apply them to each component in a space – bench, wall, table, chair, tree, garden bed etc. – you’ll suddenly come across some crazy combinations of things.
And just asking these questions does a few things.
Firstly, it forces you to answer them. To think about doing something to each thing you are exploring. In my book I call it ‘extreming’.
Secondly, each time you do this to a particular thing in your design, you see how it interacts with other spaces. Then you see how it will change those areas as well.
If you haven’t started on ‘puzzle’ designs yet, that’s fine. You can apply this idea – these questions – to your individual activity spaces. Get creative with each of those. Then once you bring it all together, explore how your ‘nonsense’ pieces all fit together.
Push it
When you have a particular idea you like to explore, see how far you can push it. It could be a material like water, timber, stone or a type of plant. Or it could be a component in a space. A seat, wall, bench, shelter, upright or other item.
Stretch and see what you can come up with. Sketch all these ideas down. Be quick and creative. Often the most fascinating designs come from small hunches someone has followed and elaborated on. They’ve tested it many times. They:
Shift it around the site.
Change the scale or size.
The colours, finishes or materials.
The orientation.
How far it goes into or impacts other spaces.
Invert it. Upside down or inside out. Back to front.
Push it as large/small/narrow/wide as it can go…
They then see what impact that idea has on other elements of the design. Real creativity is pushing the envelope. See how this simple question opens up your thinking, and ultimately your options.
What happens if I…?
Now I don’t want to suggest there aren’t creative people. There absolutely are people who are just… different. They think differently. They can’t help but be creative. They focus on slightly different things to more normal ‘thinking’ people. Textures, colours, feelings… things that aren’t easy to express or explain, but once you see the finalised project – the vision – you get it.
I’ve met a few of these people in my time, and from those experiences can comfortably say I’m not a true ‘creative’.
And that’s fine.
As I outlined above, you don’t need to be an incredible artistic talent to design incredible landscape or garden designs. I outline a whole landscape design process, and offer my own 300 page guide – The Garden Design Process – to help people learn the steps to get there.
So before you second guess yourself, let’s look at a few ‘rules’ I think many of the most creative people in the world follow.
Geniuses Follow Rules Too… And Know When To ‘Break’ Them
Regardless of the field, those at the top generally got there by following two main rules.
Rule #1. Create. A Lot.
Firstly, you need to create a lot of work. And be prepared to fail A LOT.
These are basically tests and iterations. Not every set of lyrics or melody becomes a song. Or every page or concept becomes a book. Or even every painting is curated and shown.
Picasso – perhaps the first thing one thinks of when you picture a creative person- created A LOT of art. Over 75 years (!), he is estimated to have created 13,500 paintings, 100,000 prints or engravings and 34,000 illustrations.
Was every one a priceless masterpiece? Unlikely.
But he did develop pieces of work here and there that were the pinnacle of artistic movements. And, more importantly, he kept pushing himself to explore the edges of what art was, and could be, at that time. He pushed boundaries.
But, you may ask, how did he know there were boundaries to push? Where were the edges? To know that, all creative people need to know Rule #2.
Rule #2. Know The ‘Rules’ Before You Break Them
Another way to think of it is to ensure you understand the basic fundamentals before you seek to ‘reject’ them. Most art, for example, is a reaction to, and often rejection of, work and principles that came before it.
Jackson Pollock, for example, created work the consciously rejected the standard movement at the time. He aimed to create work that ‘flowed’ from the body. That defied conventions like foreground, figure, and an up or down side of the paintings. There was no focus or background to his work.
Indeed, in some of his work he consciously had to reject the action his arm or body was making. As anyone who has sat there doodling mindlessly will know, we tend to regress to familiar shapes, curves, or other patterns. Perhaps they feel more comfortable to us physically. In some of Pollock’s work, he consciously rejected these impulses, instead veering in another direction as he dripped or painted.
One thing to note in all this abstraction – he did not start this way. Through the great depression he learnt and practised more conventional approaches to art. It was only after years of experience and a deep knowledge of the fundamentals of art that he started to reject them.
So I need to design gardens for decades before I learn how to break the rules?
Not exactly. All you need to do is follow some of the steps and ask the questions I showed you above. That will get you 90% of the way there. And that should be more than enough for most people looking for something more interesting and unique in their garden designs.
If you are already using other existing ideas as inspiration, they provide some of the conventional approach – the experience – you may be missing. It’s just that someone else has done the iteration and testing for you. And found that it (hopefully) works.
Leverage this to help inform your design. Stretch those ideas. Combine them with others. And never forget to ask those questions, especially