Plants, flowers, and trees can be a crucial part of your Huntington and East Hampton, NY Areas landscape, softening the hardscape edges and creating symmetry that pleases the eyes. The best landscape plans depend on harmony and balance to create an enticing outdoor space. Consider these plantings that landscape professionals recommend to lend color and visual appeal to your property.
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What Happens in a Landscape When There is No Balance
A landscape plan has no balance when there are too many kinds of plants and trees in the yard. It can end up looking cluttered and unkempt. Achieving landscape balance can be similar to painting a picture in art. The same principles apply—unity, repetition, and balance.
Unity in a Landscape Planting Plan
Unity in a planting plan can come from choosing the right plants in the same color family. Many landscape professionals utilize taller, fuller shrubs at the back of a landscape bed to create height there. The middle plants provide a transition and the front plants can often be flowers that bloom and remain close to the ground.
One way a landscape professional can create unity can be to repeat the same color family in several spots of the landscape. This can happen by selecting plants and flowers in various green tones with white blooming flowers. Adding soft cream-colored flowers and white tones can pull the eye through the landscape as you delight in seeing the repeated (but not boring) color design.
Repetition in a Landscape Planting Plan
Repetition is related to unity but often consists of repeated shapes and lines. A landscape professional can use the curving of the landscape beds to impart repetition that mimics the curve of the front yard walkway.
They can create a living screen for the property boundary with fast-growing evergreen trees. The trees serve several purposes, including added height, alternating planting spots to make a visual pattern, and providing privacy as they grow and fill in.
Another way to incorporate repetition can be to use the same plants such as ornamental grasses. The tallest grasses can form the background while mid-size grasses fill in the blank space and grasses that remain close to the ground can finish the landscape bed.
Balance in a Landscape Planting Plan
Balance in a landscape plant design can generally refer to symmetry or asymmetry in the plant and tree choices. The best use of principles of balance can create unity and a cohesive look.
A landscape professional can use symmetry to create balance by planting the same plant selections on each side of a walkway. Using the same plants on one side of the yard is echoed on the other side in a see-saw effect.
Asymmetry can be much harder to achieve because the plants and trees on one side are different from those on the opposite side but their size and visual weight are similar. They use their training and expertise to maintain balance by planting one large shrub on one side and three smaller shrubs on the other side.
Many times, landscape stone can be used for balance when a huge boulder is part of a landscape bed with plantings around it. On the opposite side of the yard can be five smaller stacked stones that equal the visual weight of the boulder.
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