Landscape Garden Design – The Difference between a Good Garden and a Great One

A garden can be a thing of beauty: provided a little care and attention goes into its creation. That’s where landscape garden designs come into play – the difference between creating a garden in a considered fashion and just letting things grow. With a little forward thought and planning, any outside space can become a glorious addition to house or home.

The difference between a planned garden, or a properly planned garden, and a non planned garden, is this: when you plan, you are able to give a natural effect much better than if you just throw things together and hope for the best. That’s because a garden is a defined space, usually bordered by a hedge or a fence. Nature is undefined, and so looks “right” when things just grow where they fall: a garden, which is humanity’s attempt at capturing nature in an easy to swallow format, only really looks correct if it has been planned in advance. Landscape garden design, which produces a sensible plan for every part of a garden, so all its elements can be considered as a flowing whole, allow homeowners to reproduce nature in miniature without the end results appearing too haphazard or confusing.

Let’s consider, for a moment, the natural world. The way it works and the appearances it presents – all of which we try to replicate in an intelligible way when we design and plan gardens. In the natural world, everything growing in a certain area “looks” right together. This is because all of those plants and landscape features are correct for the place in question. Sand, stone and cacti for a desert, for example – deciduous trees, shrubs and low lying fern cover for woodland. The thing about gardens, which is why we use landscape garden designs to get them right, is that they try and draw in all sorts of plants and effects from various natural landscape types and areas of the world. Without forward planning, throwing that little lot together is going to result in nothing more nor less than a big mess. Designing a garden, with the help of professional landscape garden designers (British run 4 Winds is a good example here), allows a homeowner to replicate the effects of disparate areas of the natural world without having the whole finished article look thrown together or peculiar.

Landscape garden designs allow one to use colour, seasonality and growth rate to create an ever changing, ever growing living picture. Because it has been designed according to the in depth knowledge and experience of a professional, a landscaped garden looks just right during every season of the year – there’s never too much or too little going on and everything, from the choice of plants to the size and shape of the lawn or patio areas. That means that one can choose one’s favourite aspects of the natural world (which can be as exotic or as homely as one’s own preferences) and reproduce them in a controlled way.

Control is the essence of a successful garden, which aims to rein in nature’s standard profuseness. Landscape garden design ensures that every element of one’s garden is visible, complementary and perfectly displayed – creating a controlled and intelligible slice of nature in every back yard.