What is Landscape Design?
Landscaping is something like a puzzle. Rather than getting frustrated with hundreds of small puzzle pieces, we only need to remember five for a beautiful landscape to result: color, line, form, texture, and scale. When these puzzle pieces put together, a beautiful landscape should result. When breaking these components down separately, we can see the importance of each one.
Color is an important piece to the landscape design. While color can ignite feelings of relaxation, it also has the power to add drama to your landscape. Color should always be in conjunction with the rest of the landscaping components in order to achieve a balance that will surely be pleasing to the eye. When choosing colors, it is a wise idea to refer to the color wheel. The primary colors of the wheel are red, yellow, and blue. Secondary colors are created when two of the primary colors are combined. These include orange, green, and purple. Tertiary colors are made when two secondary colors are combined. Some examples of some tertiary colors are yellow/orange, red/orange, yellow/green, blue/green, red/violet, and blue/violet. While color can be used to identify one area of the landscape to the next, it really depends on how you combine them that will make the difference between a shocking transition and a smooth one. For instance, if you're using a color scheme using the primary color yellow and the secondary color green, the tertiary colors yellow/green and blue/green will make the transitions flow across the landscape.
The way in which eyes are drawn along the length of the landscape is referred to as the concept of line. Many people consider line to be the outline of the landscape plants. Like color, lines effects the flow of the landscape and is achieved through the use of plants, tress, and shrubs of differing heights. While a straight line brings the viewers gaze directly to your chosen focal point, a curved line will let the eye cruise gently along the landscape until the focal point is reached. Form works closely with line to affect how your landscape flows. Typically referring to the shape of a plant, some basic forms of landscape plants include oval, upright, spreading, weeping, and columns.
The all around look and feel of your landscape plants is the texture. Textures are used to make your landscape design interesting and unique. Textures can range anywhere from rough or soft, fine or coarse, and shiny or dull. Lastly, scale and size can sometimes be confused with each other. Scale refers to the size of an object in relation to other objects that you may include in your landscape. Size is just the actually measurement of an object.
By balancing these five components, you have the ability to create a unique landscape that will surely be pleasing to the eye.