It often happens that the hard and fast rules damp the enthusiasm of newly-made gardeners. But the essence of garden-plot design is the right space organization. In the most of gardens which look beautiful and comfortable, we can observe the combination of the basic principles. So, if you just keep them in mind, thinking over the layout of your garden, it is very likely that you’ll manage to create the desired garden with your own hands. By the way, many landscape designers assign great but not the most important role to these rules.
Time and practice-tested design principles concern the proportions, scale, movements and flows, unity, rhythm and balance. These notions don’t have any distinct lines. They often get mixed up. The easiest way to check if you’ve considered all of them is to tick them off, estimating the preliminary plan of your garden-plot. Surely, the observance of these principles must satisfy your practical purposes, personal taste, preferences and budget.

The unity of design

The unity of design will prevent your garden from turning into a splatter of garden implements in one place. Unity is achieved with the help of common theme or style. If the house is built in the modern styles, with clear lines and shapes, then sticking to the same style of the whole garden will unite the space into a single whole. As a rule, the formal garden zones look best near the house, while the informal- at a distance. The restraint of material’s variety, shapes and colors for the garden design also helps to unite the space. And on the contrary, too large disorder in the use of different texture or colors will have an adverse effect.

The rhythmicity of design

One can run on for hours about the landscape design, as well as about the music. But it’s worth mentioning that their rhythm is set by the repetition of some elements. So it is in the garden- the groups of plants, a pair or more similar arches, steps, flowerpots and such details, repeated at certain intervals along the path, give the feeling of unity and conformity of space.

The balance of design

Try not to make the garden asymmetrical, with one part dominating over the other. High plants, large groups and accent must be uniformly distributed along the whole plot, so that both its sides are equivalent. Planning the plantings, try not to cluster all the evergreens on the one side of the garden.