Australian Native Plants Society (Australia)
Design principles
Garden design is an art as well as a science. Some gardeners claim it is the highest form of art because plants change with the seasons and the years, so the designer is working in four dimensions! Also, every area of Australia has unique climate, soil, geography, and plant and animal life, offering both possibilities and challenges in garden design.
Yet, beneath the surface of this art are a set of principles. Getting to grips with these principles helps unravel the intricacies of garden design to assist you create your dream garden. These garden design principles apply to all gardens, including native gardens
This section delves into these principles, exploring concepts such as scale and proportion, symmetry and harmony, masses and voids, line, shape, and form, and focal points.
Design principles stories
Design for climate change
Given the way the climate is headed, we should consider how to design our native gardens for climate change. I live and garden on a north facing hillside south-east of…
View storyMy front courtyard garden
It’s always useful to critique one’s own garden from a design perspectiveand here I have assessed my own front courtyard garden. Site conditions and analysis Location and aspect are both…
View story‘Spirit of the Garden’, a book
Here is a beautiful and emotive book, published several years ago, called the Spirit of the Garden, by Trisha Dixon. ‘Gardens can be formal or wild, serene or ostentatious, native…
View storyDiversity AND uniformity
As I contemplate my 20 year old native garden, I realise that it is now a mix of both diversity AND uniformity. However, there is a strong bias towards allowing…
View storyFocal points in garden design
Focal points are vital elements in garden design. They are just as useful, even when the landscape is quite stark, such as in the Queensland outback! Here is an outline…
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