What are the 7 Principles of Landscape Design?

There’s a method behind all madness. When you’re digging up the dirt in your yard, it's so flowers can bloom in neatly defined rows. When you lay down hardscape, it’s so you can set the boundaries between your different landscaping projects. Everything has a purpose when you’re doing it right. To really master landscaping and complete your project perfectly, you should learn how it all works. The core of any successful landscaping project is called the 7 principles of landscape design.

The 7 Principles of Landscape Design

All landscaping design is about producing an outdoor space that’s pleasing to the eye. These principles are:

• Unity
• Scale 
• Balance
• Simplicity 
• Variety 
• Emphasis
• Sequence 

The most important is how these principles connect and apply to line, form, texture, and color to provide a pleasing outdoor space.

Unity 

The first principle forms the foundation of landscape design, bringing projects and their materials back to basics. It’s where you come up with ideas, consider how they will contrast, and if that contrast is how you want your project to hold people’s attention. 

Consider if the plants you want to use will all be the same or similar color, which means their form is how they will stand out. Or maybe you can use similarly shaped flowers of different colors, and use the color contrast to draw attention. 

Unity is about finding something that brings sections of the landscape together, either through their similarities or differences.

Scale

Math is also incredibly important to landscaping. You have to keep track of how much you use, how long something will be, and how long will something take to grow. That’s just the most basic kind of scale you need to do. You’ll have to scale your project from beginning to end. 

After all the materials and measurements are made, you have to consider how much space you want in your yard. Do you want to have a high-scale environment, where you’re using more space than not? Or do you want the opposite low-scale environment where you leave room between different aspects of your landscaping project?

Even if your project is technically finished, you’ll still use this principle of landscape design to maintain it.

Balance

The difference between a landscape that is full and flourishing and a landscape that is busy and distracting, is balance. Balance doesn’t mean that everything needs to be symmetrical or equal. You can have one side of your landscape have all the color in the world, and leave the other side as nothing but grass, and still have balance. 

Balance means it's not random. If you have a meadow in your yard, you balance it out with a path to walk through it. If you have a garden full of flowers, you have multiple different colors in specific spots so it's not visually overwhelming. Everything should work together, nothing should be random.

Simplicity & Variety

These two principles of landscape design go hand and hand. You can find balance by finding the right middle ground between simplicity and variety. Simplicity means having numerous matching aspects in your yard. Such as when some flowers are the same color or the same type for example. At the same time, moving those flowers around the yard can add a level of variety to the landscape.

Emphasis

When you want to add detail, emphasis is the principle you use. Sometimes you can add something that people are supposed to ignore to your yard. A pocket of flowers stands out more when it's surrounded by family leafy greens. 

You can use plants that are already a part of your landscape, or ones common in your area to surround the aspects of your landscaping project that you want people to notice the most. This is what it means to emphasize it.

Sequence

The order in which things are placed matters. You sequence things based on size, color, and shape. When you do, you highlight their differences, even if they’re minimal, to bring out their noteworthy qualities. Even two flowers of the same species and color aren’t the same, and having a bundle of three or four together can highlight that. 

Not everything in your landscape design has to be something that immediately stands out to people. You can leave subtle details that people have to discover for themselves. Most of the other principles of landscape design are overt with what they are doing, but sequencing can be as covert or overt as you want.

Contact Our Experts on the Principles of Landscape Design

Your local Pioneer Landscape Centers are run and managed by experts who work in landscape design every day. If you want to know what’s the best strategy or material for what you’re trying to do, you can trust us. We’ll help you get everything you need together, help you double-check your measurements, and help you figure out how to make your design a reality. Contact us today.