Landscaping DIY: Learning the Basics

The DIY landscaping style can be successful only if one has learned the basic principles related to landscaping in general. Whether you're borrowing a certain landscaping idea that you found in a magazine or on the internet, knowing the basics of landscaping could help you understand what you would do later. Knowing these principles can even help you enhance your own creativity as you try to develop your own gardening ideas.

One of the basic principles of landscaping is to aim for some form of unity in design. Unity, as a principle, should be considered as one of your main goals in garden design. Unity can be applied in the form of consistency and repetition. Repetition creates unity in landscape design by repeating similar elements such as plants, groups of plants, or other types of decoration throughout the landscape.

Coherence creates unity by allowing some or all of the various elements of a planned landscape to fit together and be seen as part of a whole. It can be achieved through the consistency of character of the different elements such as height, size, texture, color schemes, etc.

Another important principle essential to landscape design is balance. Balance is a sense of equality in the overall design. Basically, two types of balance are employed in landscape design. Symmetrical balance is characterized by the uniform spacing of matching elements in the garden design. The design of a garden achieves a symmetrical balance when the elements share all or part of the same shape, shape, groupings, colors, theme, etc.

Achieving an asymmetrical balance in garden design can be a bit more complex. While the characteristics of the elements, such as textures, shapes and colors, can remain constant to create a certain unity, some shapes and designs can be more random. To achieve this form of balance, it is often essential to make use of separate or different themes in landscape design, but each has an equal but different kind of attraction.

Another principle to consider in landscape design is the natural transition. This principle can be used to avoid radical or hasty changes in your landscaping design. The transition is basically a gradual change. It can best be displayed in terms of the height or color of the plant. The natural transition can also be applied to all other elements of the landscape, such as textures, shape and size of the different elements of the landscape.

The transition can be achieved in natural environments by the gradual, ascending or descending arrangement of different elements. A good example of achieving a natural transition would be to use a stepping effect of large trees going to medium trees, then bushes, and finally bedding plants.

Simplicity is another basic gardening principle that can be one of the best guidelines you can follow when you are just starting to DIY. The goal of keeping things simple can provide certain advantages to start with. One is that you can accomplish more by doing less. Improvements can be made later.

Choosing two or three basic colors to use in the landscape and then repeating them throughout your garden design is one way to keep things simple. Keeping the use of decoration to a minimum and limited to a specific theme is also a means of achieving simplicity in garden design.