The Beginner's Garden - The Fundamentals of Garden Design

1. Course Introduction: Hi, and welcome in. This course is an introduction to the solid fundamental concepts of how to lay out and design the residential garden. We always start with a conceptual plan, and I'm going to walk you through the steps to how to achieve this where your plans and your ideas are going to be more imaginative and more creative. We're going to be talking about three dimensional space and the different design principles that help to bring all of these elements together. Now, this is a course on garden design and not gardening. So I'm not going to be going into great depth on actual planting design. I have students from all over the world with different environments, different climates, and that just wouldn't be practical. But I am going to discuss plant design theory and how plants reinforce your design solutions. So this course is going to give you the knowledge to be more imaginative and more creative in your designs, to create functional space where all of the elements are going to be flowing together and working together to the greater good. So with all of that said, I will look forward to seeing you in lecture number one, and let's just jump straight on him. 2. Course overview and Class Project: In this lesson, we're going to start talking about our design objectives. Whenever you start a project, you should have some direction that you're going in to be able to achieve and meet your client's expectations. And we call these design objectives, and there's primarily three of them. And the first one is we want to be able to integrate the architecture of the home with the garden or the garden with the architecture of the home. So for example, if I'm designing a garden for an arts and crafts style home, one that would have been built in the early 20th century, the siding may be cedar or redwood shingles, the porch may be of brick, you know, different building materials. And I'm going to want to pay attention to the architecture and the style of the home. And for a home of this era, I would be looking at reference books to see what kind of plant material might have been popular at that time and how they may have used natural elements, boulders or such to complement the architecture of the original architect. So I'm integrating the landscape design with the architecture of the home and trying to make that flow together seamlessly. If on the other hand, I was looking at a very crisp and modern home from here in the early 21st century, then I might be looking at different materials, maybe, um, concrete that is of a very almost white color to it, you know, deep blue tiles for the pool, you know, different elements that bring modernism into my design to complement what is going to be part of the architecture of that home. So the integration of the home, the architecture, and the garden together, so they work together in a synergistic way. The second design objective is going to create functional space. If I want to have a recreational area, well, I'll be in consultation with the homeowner. What kind of sports or activities are you interested in? And if it's simply a Batch ball court, well, I'm going to look up the dimensions of Bach ball Court, and I'm going to incorporate that to where the space for that Bach ball court is going to be functional and large enough, not just for the court itself. But for pedestrian traffic around it, where people can sit and relax or enjoy the game. On the other hand, if they like to play badminton or croquet, then we're looking at a much larger area. And typically recreational areas are going to be large rectangles longer than they are wide. If I'm looking at patio space, entertaining areas, then it's the same idea. I still want it to be functional. I want to have enough room for table and chairs, and yet have enough room where pedestrians can circulate all the way around. I may want to have an area for a barbecue or cooking area. Well, this would become ultimately a subspace of the patio, the main entertainment area, but I still want to have enough room and create circulation patterns through the use of vertical planes that are going to help to define the space. Finally, you want to meet or exceed the expectations of your client. And I think Fletcher Steel, a landscape architect from the early 20th century, said it very well when he said that you don't want to just listen to what the client is asking for but what they dream of having. Then we as designers need to be able to interpret what they are asking of us and take advantage of that and come up with something beyond their expectations. So the three design objectives to incorporate and integrate the home and the garden together, create that functional space for whatever purpose that we're designing for and consult with the homeowner, and then finally meet or exceed the expectations of what they are asking of us as landscape designers, landscape architects. Okay, so in the next lesson, we're going to start taking apart these three planes of enclosure and talking about how they affect our perception and our movement through a garden. Okay, thanks for watching. And let's take a short break, and I'll see you back here in a moment. 3. What is Garden Design: In this lesson, we're going to start talking about our design objectives. Whenever you start a project, you should have some direction that you're going in to be able to achieve and meet your client's expectations. And we call these design objectives, and there's primarily three of them. And the first one is we want to be able to integrate the architecture of the home with the garden or the garden with the architecture of the home. So for example, if I'm designing a garden for an arts and crafts style home, one that would have been built in the early 20th century, the siding may be cedar or redwood shingles, the porch may be of brick, you know, different building materials. And I'm going to want to pay attention to the architecture and the style of the home. And for a home of this era, I would be looking at reference books to see what kind of plant material might have been popular at that time and how they may have used natural elements, boulders or such to complement the architecture of the original architect. So I'm integrating the landscape design with the architecture of the home and trying to make that flow together seamlessly. If on the other hand, I was looking at a very crisp and modern home from here in the early 21st century, then I might be looking at different materials, maybe, um, concrete that is of a very almost white color to it, you know, deep blue tiles for the pool, you know, different elements that bring modernism into my design to complement what is going to be part of the architecture of that home. So the integration of the home, the architecture, and the garden together, so they work together in a synergistic way. The second design objective is going to create functional space. If I want to have a recreational area, well, I'll be in consultation with the homeowner. What kind of sports or activities are you interested in? And if it's simply a Batch ball court, well, I'm going to look up the dimensions of Bach ball Court, and I'm going to incorporate that to where the space for that Bach ball court is going to be functional and large enough, not just for the court itself. But for pedestrian traffic around it, where people can sit and relax or enjoy the game. On the other hand, if they like to play badminton or croquet, then we're looking at a much larger area. And typically recreational areas are going to be large rectangles longer than they are wide. If I'm looking at patio space, entertaining areas, then it's the same idea. I still want it to be functional. I want to have enough room for table and chairs, and yet have enough room where pedestrians can circulate all the way around. I may want to have an area for a barbecue or cooking area. Well, this would become ultimately a subspace of the patio, the main entertainment area, but I still want to have enough room and create circulation patterns through the use of vertical planes that are going to help to define the space. Finally, you want to meet or exceed the expectations of your client. And I think Fletcher Steel, a landscape architect from the early 20th century, said it very well when he said that you don't want to just listen to what the client is asking for but what they dream of having. Then we as designers need to be able to interpret what they are asking of us and take advantage of that and come up with something beyond their expectations. So the three design objectives to incorporate and integrate the home and the garden together, create that functional space for whatever purpose that we're designing for and consult with the homeowner, and then finally meet or exceed the expectations of what they are asking of us as landscape designers, landscape architects. Okay, so in the next lesson, we're going to start taking apart these three planes of enclosure and talking about how they affect our perception and our movement through a garden. Okay, thanks for watching. And let's take a short break, and I'll see you back here in a moment. 4. Design Objectives: In this lesson, we're going to start talking about our design objectives. Whenever you start a project, you should have some direction that you're going in to be able to achieve and meet your client's expectations. And we call these design objectives, and there's primarily three of them. And the first one is we want to be able to integrate the architecture of the home with the garden or the garden with the architecture of the home. So for example, if I'm designing a garden for an arts and crafts style home, one that would have been built in the early 20th century, the siding may be cedar or redwood shingles, the porch may be of brick, you know, different building materials. And I'm going to want to pay attention to the architecture and the style of the home. And for a home of this era, I would be looking at reference books to see what kind of plant material might have been popular at that time and how they may have used natural elements, boulders or such to complement the architecture of the original architect. So I'm integrating the landscape design with the architecture of the home and trying to make that flow together seamlessly. If on the other hand, I was looking at a very crisp and modern home from here in the early 21st century, then I might be looking at different materials, maybe, um, concrete that is of a very almost white color to it, you know, deep blue tiles for the pool, you know, different elements that bring modernism into my design to complement what is going to be part of the architecture of that home. So the integration of the home, the architecture, and the garden together, so they work together in a synergistic way. The second design objective is going to create functional space. If I want to have a recreational area, well, I'll be in consultation with the homeowner. What kind of sports or activities are you interested in? And if it's simply a Batch ball court, well, I'm going to look up the dimensions of Bach ball Court, and I'm going to incorporate that to where the space for that Bach ball court is going to be functional and large enough, not just for the court itself. But for pedestrian traffic around it, where people can sit and relax or enjoy the game. On the other hand, if they like to play badminton or croquet, then we're looking at a much larger area. And typically recreational areas are going to be large rectangles longer than they are wide. If I'm looking at patio space, entertaining areas, then it's the same idea. I still want it to be functional. I want to have enough room for table and chairs, and yet have enough room where pedestrians can circulate all the way around. I may want to have an area for a barbecue or cooking area. Well, this would become ultimately a subspace of the patio, the main entertainment area, but I still want to have enough room and create circulation patterns through the use of vertical planes that are going to help to define the space. Finally, you want to meet or exceed the expectations of your client. And I think Fletcher Steel, a landscape architect from the early 20th century, said it very well when he said that you don't want to just listen to what the client is asking for but what they dream of having. Then we as designers need to be able to interpret what they are asking of us and take advantage of that and come up with something beyond their expectations. So the three design objectives to incorporate and integrate the home and the garden together, create that functional space for whatever purpose that we're designing for and consult with the homeowner, and then finally meet or exceed the expectations of what they are asking of us as landscape designers, landscape architects. Okay, so in the next lesson, we're going to start taking apart these three planes of enclosure and talking about how they affect our perception and our movement through a garden. Okay, thanks for watching. And let's take a short break, and I'll see you back here in a moment. 5. Three Planes of Enclosure: So let's talk about these three planes of enclosure. And I am in my office, and in the office, I have a very well defined sense of space. I have the floor or the base plane, and the furniture, everything sits on this floor or base plane. I have the vertical plane, which are the walls of my office, and I have the overhead plane, which is, in this case, the ceiling. So when we're designing, we're really starting our designs by looking at the base plane. So remember, we are designing on a sheet of paper, and we're going to start drawing patterns and working out shapes and defining them out to be functional and purposeful to what our design intent is. So everything starts being designed on the floor plane, on the base plane, and we interrelate and interconnect shapes within this concept, this two dimensional view before we start working our way up. Once we have a base plane that we are happy with or at least we're experimenting with, then we can come in and in this instance, using the walls of my office as an example, I have my vertical plane coming up, but I'm also creating views outside of the office space. I'm creating views with the window behind me. I'm creating views with windows at each end of the office. So those are portals into this space that I am within now. My ceiling is a traditional eight foot ceiling, so it's high enough to where I don't feel cramped. It's not so high that I feel like it's soaring away. But think about how you would feel if you walk into a cathedral here in the States or in Europe, and you've come in, and now you have these massive buttress ceilings going way up into the air, you have this huge sense of just spaciousness. On the other hand, if I walk into a space where the ceiling, maybe it's lower than eight foot for whatever reason. Then it's going to have a very direct impact on how I perceive the space that I have just walked into. So these three planes of enclosure are what define our spaces. And interior space is very well defined with our floor, our walls, our floor coverings. The ceiling, however, we embellish our doorways and our frames. Out of doors, it's going to be more fluid. So out of doors, base plane could be concrete patio, brick patio, it could be gravel walkway. If it's a recreational area, it would probably be turf or maybe it's asphalt if you've got a sports court, and vertical elements can be an 18 inch high seating wall around the patio. Now you have definition to the patio. You can control how people move in and out and use the space, but you're also creating an additional seating area when there's extra people or children, and they just want to sit on the edge of the wall. So we've got that element. We also have the idea of having rock walls and hedges, giving us vertical elements and separation from one part of the garden to another. And even something like a bamboo hedge, which gives us a sense of privacy and yet still allows air movement and to a degree a certain amount of visual movement through that hedge, can give another perception to the space. The three planes of enclosure are how we are going to manipulate the space that we design our gardens in and how we are going to use these planes to help move people from one area to another. The patterns we might use for, say, brick paving are going to help either be dynamic and move people, or it's going to be static and keep people kind of in one place. Kinds of vertical planes we're going to use are going to help to define the space, give extra functionality to that space, and move people along. And then finally, the overhead plane, well, on a patio, it might be an arbor or a solid soffit. It could be the canopies of the trees. It could be an arbor with vines growing on it. It can actually even be just the open sky. All of these are going to have a direct implication on how we perceive this space. So there's our three planes of enclosure, and that's what we're going to be using to achieve our design objectives of integrating the home and the garden together, creating functional space, and meeting or exceeding the desires of our clients. So now, how can we put all of this together and do it in an orderly fashion? And that's what we're gonna be talking about in upcoming lectures. Okay, thanks for watching. And let's take a short break, and I'll see you in a bit. 6. Form Composition: Okay, now that we have looked at the three planes of enclosure, where we have our base plane, our vertical planes, and our overhead plane, when we're starting a design, we're always designing on the base plane, on that floor plane and interconnecting shapes and defining our functionality of the garden of the design intent that we are coming up with. And we're starting that on that floor plane, that base plane. Well, when we start combining shapes together, then we want to do it in a logical and cohesive manner, and that is referred to as form composition or geometry of shape. And it holds, whether you're doing landscape design, landscape architecture or architectural drawings for buildings or homes. So let's just jump onto the board, and we're going to look at these two basic geometrical shapes the circle and the square, their component parts, and how they relate to each other and how we use these in garden design. And in this lesson, we're going to be taking a closer look at the two primary shapes that we use in landscape design. And these two shapes are right here in front of us, the circle and the square, and each of these shapes have component parts to them, and we're going to take a closer look at all of this and see how these component parts not only define the individual shape, but how you can use these component parts to combine these two shapes to make very strong form composition and strong garden plans when you're working on a project. So we're going to start by looking at the circle and with the circle, the center is arguably the most important point. If you think of a circle in the terms of a dartboard, everything is focused in towards the center of that dartboard. So everything radiates out from the center of the circle and the circumference is defined by it, the radius is defined. All of these components relate directly back to the center. And the circumference simply refers to a continual arc all the way around the circle and the circle can be dissected in half by the diameter and the diameter also has the ability to go beyond the circle or the circumference of the circle and become an extended diameter. A component part that is extending out into space, so to speak. Of course, we have the radius and just like the extended diameter, we have an extended radius. There's one more straight line that we work with quite a bit on the circle and that straight line is referred to as the tangent, see if I can grab this and the tangent is simply a straight line that flows effortlessly off of the arc of the circle, off of the arc of the circumference. Here are our component parts of a circle as you look at this and now we're going to look at the square, you can see how parts these component parts of the shape can relate to each other. So let's look at the square and see what component parts it is made up of. Well, as everyone knows, a square is basically a box with four equal sides. But a square now can be dissected. On its axis, and now we have four squares proportional to our original. The square is unique in that it can be divided on the diagonal. We have a 45 degree angle between this axis line and this diagonal. And just like the circle that had extended diameter, extended radius, the square has extended sides. It has extended diagonals and it has an extended axis. All of these lines continue out into space. The extended axis could be coming off of the center axis right here, extended diagonal could be continuing in this way. But the square is unique also in that each of these individual quarters can now be subdivided into four smaller squares of proportional value to not only the original quarter square but the whole square itself. And we can take these and multiply them out to start forming rectangles. So these are the component parts of the square and how they can be used in landscape design to relate to the circle and start building very strong form composition. So let's take a look at this, and this is just something really simple I put together just as a demonstration. But say you have, I'm calling this the patio area. You can take this side, extend that line geometrically straight on out. It flows effortlessly into the tangent of a circle, swings around on the arc of the circumference. If this line along here and this top line along here were extended, they would meet right here in the center of this circle, that would be possibly a fountain head. We have an extended radius. We have an extended radius, even though you don't physically see the line connecting visually it ties directly into this center. Now we've got the extended radius or it could be an extended axis coming on across. We've taken this patio area, doubled it in size to create a rectangular area, seating walls to give interest, a fire pit, perhaps some kind of gravel or decomposed granite in here, a lawn area. Now I've got this area in blue that hasn't been defined, but I could take this to my client and just draw in some mass plantings. And at this point in the conceptual design, I don't necessarily need to know what kind of material the patio is made of. I don't need to know exactly what type of water feature this is going to be. And I don't need to know what kind of plants are necessarily going to be in this particular area, but it's a way of getting a conversation started. So this is how in a very simple diagram, how the component parts of shapes relate to each other within garden design. Now, we're going to take a look at some actual designs and see how that idea is played out in something that's a little more realistic. So let's take a look. 7. Examples of Form Composition: Well, we've looked at some kind of theoretical ideas with the idea of combining shapes, form composition, combining the circle and the square, using their component parts. But let's take a look at some actual garden designs that have utilized this. One from one of my students in the past, one that I did when I was studying in England, and then one from a landscape architect and acquaintance of mine from England, as well. So let's just take a look at some practical applications of form composition. Okay, so let's take a look at a couple of examples of form composition and how design approach these two ideas work together. So in this instance, we have the residence of the house, and we've got this kickout coming out, and then a 45 degree area out here, an alcove in the home. So we've reinforced the architecture of the home by coming out with 45 degree, a rectangle 45 degree pattern. And we're coming out and stepping down into the garden. And at this point, we're coming across, and all of these pathways are on a rectangular 45 degree pattern, 45 degrees. We come up, that's 45 to this angle, come back over into this area. Some hedging proposed hedging, and then you have your turf area, stepping stones coming across just to give some interest to the composition. Everything holds together. And as far as form composition is concerned, all of the component parts of these shapes relate to one another. So the axis of a square, the axis of a rectangle all comes out to form these shapes all the way around within the garden itself. So design approach gives us an idea of how we want to lay out the garden. Form composition helps us to keep all of the component parts of our shapes together. So let's just take a quick look at one that I did in England a number of years ago. This is one I did a few years back when I was in England, and in this one, we had one existing tree, and as a result, I use that tree as the hub of a concentric or radial design. If you look at this closely, then if I use this as my center point, my lines, extended radius lines all come out from this point right here, into the yard. The center of the circle becomes a very strong focal point even for these arbors, at this point right here, if you were to extend them, they're all just segments of an extended radius coming from this location right here and even the arc that I'm using for the hedging is built off of this center. That's what I was meaning by the center of the circle can become a very powerful focal point within a composition for awkward shaped properties, a radio, concentric circle design can be a very powerful solution to getting people out and moving through the garden. Okay, so one last example of form composition and design approach. Again, when we talk about reinforcing the architecture of the home, we can talk about something called the rule of thirds. And the rule of thirds in garden design simply says that the closer you are to the architecture, to the home, the dominant building on the site, you want to reinforce that architecture with a slightly more formal approach. In this case, a rectangular design approach coming right off of the house. In this one that we looked at earlier, we were using a rectangular 45 degree to reflect the architecture of the house. As you segue further from the home, you can start to drop into a more naturalistic or softer design approach. So as we come out along here, we're actually dropping into a little bit of an arc and tangent because we've got our tangent line and arc. But then we drop back into a rectangular 45 at this location, reinforcing the shape and placement of the swimming pool. But now we can come off of and because the property is deep enough, we can drop into a curvilinear design. So we have a pool house, we can use the back of the pool house as a tangent line. We can come directly off of that into a nice arc, and it just swings all the way around, it comes around and feeds itself right back up into the tangent off of this paving and planting beds. So it works its way smoothly throughout the composition. Each of these arcs is built off of a circle. I could put a center point, draw a radius line out and have this circle defined exactly the way I want it in construction, the same with this arc, this arc, even this arc here. These trellises reinforce the 45 degree angle. So form composition holds all of this together. Design approach gives us that direction to keep our garden cohesive and flowing nicely, and then plantings smooth and blur these lines. So we've got a rectangular design approach, an arc and tangent design approach, a rectangular 45, and a curvilinear all within one property. But they all flow together due to paying attention to form composition and the overall component parts of our different shapes. So that's what we want to accomplish when we're doing good solid garden design. 8. Form Composition Wrap up: Okay, to summarize form composition, our geometry of shape, what we've talked about, if you can master these ideas of combining circles and squares, expanding squares into rectangles, working off of tangents of circles to flow into other compositions, you're going to really be able to start combining and making good solid landscape design, landscape architecture. Once you have it developed on that base plane, then we can start looking at the vertical plane. Okay? I've got a patio. Maybe I want to define how people are going to use that. So now I can come in and maybe I've got a large square or rectangle. Now I can come in and build seating walls around the perimeter. I can start working in those directions to create vertical elements that will define space and frame views and control traffic patterns. Then I can come into the overhead plane. And depending on whether it's an open arbor with plants growing on it or a solid roof or soft to protect from the rain and wind and sun, it doesn't matter, but you start building these three planes of enclosure off of your base plane using form composition, combining these shapes together, and now you've got a good solid start on doing excellent garden design landscape architecture. So from this point, we're going to start talking about design approach. Now that we understand three planes of enclosure, we understand form composition. Now let's look at an approach that is going to give us kind of a blueprint or a recipe for what might work in any particular setting. And that's where we're going to go next. Okay. I'll see you in Avent. 9. Introduction to Design Approach: So a quick recap. We've gone over the planes of enclosure, and we've gone over form composition. Now we want to take these and come up with a recipe to where we can approach any property, front yard or backyard and develop a design that's going to be fluid and move our clients or ourselves, our guests through the spaces that we're designing. And this is referred to as our design approach. And there's five basic design approach concepts that we work with. One is arc and tangent, one is rectangular, one is rectangular 45. One is radial, and the last one is curvilinear. And because these concepts can seem a bit restrictive at the beginning when you're first starting out, I'm going to take these and break them down to five separate short lessons to kind of demonstrate how these flow and how they work to a greater degree. And then I can take and say, I'm going to have one design approach in the front yard, say, a rectangular approach. But I can segue into a rectangular 45, an arc and tangent or a radio, whatever in the backyard. But how I combine these forms, how I move these people down pathways and do my form composition, and then segue into an individual design approach is going to be key to how successful your garden is going to be overall. So let's go ahead and we're just going to take these one at a time and see what they have to say for themselves and walk our way through it. So let's jump into design approach, and I'll see you in just a few moments. Let's take a short break. 10. Rectangular Design: Alright. In this lesson, we're going to take a look at rectangular design approach, and we're going to look at three different designs. One is a conceptual plan that one of my students did a number of years ago. Another one is a conceptual plan that I did and that was subsequently built out. So we'll see the plan and then the actual constructed garden. And then we're going to take a look at an architectural plan that is rectangular as well. So we'll walk our way through all three of these, and let's just take a look and see what rectangular design has to say for itself. So here is one more example of a rectangular design and a very odd shaped, pie shaped property. And yet, when Kathy did her design, we came out the back door and everything is just basically squares and rectangles. But all of the component parts, all of the form composition flows together. You ignore the property lines when you're doing your design. You're radiating from the house out. And where the property lines don't necessarily match up with whatever design approach you're working with, that's where plantings come in to soften and blur those lines out. But you came down stairs depicted, stairs depicted, swimming pool, lap pool, spa, eating area, another little water feature. Conceptual plantings just to give the client an idea of what it could look like. At this point, none of these plants have actually been selected, but the purpose of their being there screening, some screening, some shade factor, some interest, all of this ties together. And again, this is another design that was done by hand and hand colored, and I think she did a beautiful job with this. But a simple rectangular design where the plants blur these straight lines. And yet you've got a lot of very usable space within a project like this. Okay, so here is a conceptual plan. I did a number of years ago for some clients. This was on the east side of the house, so it was protected from the western summer sun. And originally, it was just a Bermuda grass lawn, and they decided that they wanted to have more functional area an area where they could entertain, where they could sit outside in the afternoon and have some protection from that hot sun. So I brought them in from the driveway, and we had to step up at that point where the entry arbor is. And as we came along with this rectangular design, we stepped up one more time because there was a number of steps coming into the actual entry to the house, and I wanted to soften that down. By the time I had made two steps up, 26 inch steps, well, we had gained 12 " in elevation. So I was able to turn them and drop them back down 12 " to the sunken patio area, and we were really back on original grade. So I set a fountain at one end corner of the patio in order to give them a focal point as they came into the property, and also added a patio arbor to give them a little bit of shade and just some vertical element and overhead element to it. And then we went ahead and created some subspaces where we stepped back up out of the sunken patio and came over to a barbecue area. And then, again, because we had already stepped up two steps, we were able to soften the number of steps going into the entry to the house itself. And this is what that simple rectangular design ended up looking like. So a very nice, casual entry. We use natural stone for the paving, and it picked up the colors of the roof very nicely. And then as you go up that first step that you can see, we were able to turn and drop back down into the lower patio. And now those walls, because they come up 6 " above the walkway, and yet are 12 " above the lower, we've got 18 inch high, you know, casual seating wall. So this one turned out very nicely. Now, this is an architectural design, another rectangular design. And this was done by Frank Lloyd Wright. This is falling water in Western Pennsylvania. And again, rectangular designs do not have to be boring. And falling water is certainly anything but a boring design. And when you see it in plan view, it's like, Oh, okay, it's rectangular, but when you see the actual built construction, then we've got something that is really quite spectacular and how the house just kind of cantilevers out over the creek and then natural stone reinforcing the rural area that it is in and it's even carried into the house as well with natural stone that flows right out onto the outside balcony. So all of these are ways of working with rectangular design. And I just think that whether it's in the garden or in the architecture, rectangular design can really be quite stunning. So to summarize rectangular design, what we're doing is we're creating spaces that either are perpendicular or parallel to the house. Rectangular design does tend to reinforce the architecture of the home overall. And as in any design, you want to create dominant space. In the backyard, that could be a recreation area. It could be the patio area, but you want to have a dominant space within your composition. Then you can come in with the vertical planes and start to create seating walls or other elements that are going to be vertical in nature, that are going to help to create subspaces within your composition, and you're going to be able to help to create movement within the design as well. So now we can have dining over here, and entry over to the recreation area or another part of the yard over there, and you're moving people and they don't really know they're being moved in this sense, but they are and now you're going to come in with the overhead plane and create shadow or transition between spaces and the sense of an arbor, and all of this can follow very, very well. But we've looked at three different designs, and if it's done properly and with some creativity, then rectangular design, I think, is anything but boring. And I typically tend to start all of my designs in rectangular design approach initially. That kind of gets me flowing with ideas, and then I can manipulate or shift to a different design approach if I feel it's warranted. So we're going to go ahead and take a look at another design approach in the next lesson and work our way through all five of these. Okay. I'll see you in a bit. 11. Rectangular 45 Design Approach: Okay, in the last lesson, we looked at rectangular design and how it can apply to, you know, properties that are odd shaped, properties that are long and linear and basically mimic the footprint of the house, and how it is used in architectural design as well. So in this lesson, take a look at rectangular 45, where we're going to take that same basic shape, the rectangular shape but now we're going to turn it at a 45 degree angle from the house and how that can give the property or the design solution a little bit more dynamics and interest. So let's take a look at one of these designs. This is an example of a rectangular 45 degree design. And in this one, I know we've looked at this before, but my student, she brought us in on the side of the house on just a straight linear rectangular walk. But at the back of the house, she turned this to a 45 degree. So instead of just coming straight in 90 degrees into a square patio. She gave it a lot more interest by coming in and turning it and coming down this walkway here. Splitting this distance here to create a wooden deck. So she's changed material. She's put an arbor over the top of it to give more of a intimate subspace to this. You turn and come back into the patio area. She's got an arbor across here where she actually has a gate coming across. So she's made this little area a private patio off of the master bedroom, and now she's got the main courtyard area in tile, another arbor coming down. This is a 45 degree. So it's just taking this linear rectangular design and tilting it 45 degrees, and it gives some more dynamics and more interest, a bark floor, woodland seating area, water, fire pit, barbecue area, and then of course, the graphics just showing some conceptual plans. Again, this design is all hand drawn and hand colored and just the concepts of creating some privacy and subspace and then back into a rectangular design to come down this area, past the air conditioning and out into the front yard again. So that's an example of a rectangular 45 degree. So that's Rectangular 45. Again, it's a recipe. It gives you an idea of how you might want to move people through a garden give it a little more interest potentially than rectangular design, not always, but potentially, it helps to direct focus or attention to one corner of the property or another in a more dynamic way. And it's just another way of being able to work with form composition to where we're keeping all of the elements, all of our shapes working together to be a cohesive whole and not just kind of a mishmash of, Oh, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that. And then nothing really ties together. And again, just like in rectangular design, we come back with our vertical elements, our overhead planes to add more interest, create subspaces and get people interested in going out and exploring the garden and using plant material to soften the edges, to soften the straight lines that are directing and moving people through the garden. Okay, so that's Rectangular 45, and let's move on and take a look at another one. 12. Arc and Tangent in Garden Design: Alright. In this lesson, we're going to look at what we call arc and tangent design. And just like in rectangular design, and we went from rectangular, where it's parallel and perpendicular to the home to the structure. And then we went with a rectangular 45, which gives us the opportunity to direct views to different portions of the garden simply by turning that 45 degree angle, with arc and tangent, if you remember back to form composition, one of the component parts of the circle is the tangent line, that straight line that comes effortlessly off of the arc, the circumference of our circle. So with arc and tangent, we're basically working with a rectangular design. But instead of having a hard 90 degree turn or a 45 degree angle, we're going to go into the tangent of that circle and have a nice soft rounded turn to what we're working with. So we're going to look at a design, one that I did a number of years ago when I was studying in England, and it's actually a combination of our rectangular 45 and our con tangent. And I think this will be a good one. It's simple, but it's going to illustrate how you can combine two different design approach in the backyard in property and still have all of your form composition, all of this work together appropriately and flow very nicely. So let's just take a look and I'll walk us through this. So here's a design I did a few years. And this really combines a couple of different design approach. We've got a rectangular 45 and an arc and tangent. So let's take this apart. Here's our 45 degree, and that's coming directly off of the house. So there's your rectangular 45, the low wall giving it some definition from the patio to the turf, the lawn area, and this planting area. Then we're coming down along this linear pathway, which is at a 45 degree exit from the patio. It comes down, and the arc and tangent gets picked up where the straight line of the pathway is the tangent that swings into the arc, swings all the way around terminates in a water fountain in a pool of water, and then you have bench seating and some timber decking, which is a step up from the patio, which again is laid on a 45 degree angle. So you're picking up this same pattern over at this end of the yard, and then the 45 degrees is reinforced with this trellising and even the shape of the planters as it intrudes into the turf area to help break up your view a little bit there. So even though that was a fairly simple example of arc contangent and rectangular 45, the key to it is when you're working with a rectangular design and even a rectangular 45 design, if you don't want those harder angles of a 90 or 45 degree, then as long as you set your compass and work with the actual tangent lines off of circles, you can soften those turns down. You can soften the composition in that way. And that can add some nicer, softer lines to it, which a lot of clients like to have. And you can still blur your lines with your plant material. When you have grasses or other shrubbery, whatever cascading along the pathway or along the edge of a patio, then those straight lines or even those curved lines can become blurred, and it kind of gives a little extra movement to visually that material, that paving material that you're looking at. And it can create visual movement, depending on how wide that path and how much the plant material may encroach on one side as opposed to the other to create this flowing movement looking down a path. So even though you do still have strong structure and form composition to your design, what you've done is you've softened it down and created even more visual interest. And remember, the plant material, even though it may be low, it's still a vertical element in the garden. So okay, so that gets us through our third design approach. So let's go ahead and we're going to take a look at radial design approach in the next lesson. Okay. I'll see you in a bit. 13. Radial Design: Okay, in this lesson, we're going to take a look at radial design approach or also known as concentric circle design approach. And this is a method or an approach where if you have an irregular shaped property, it's actually a really good way to focus or manipulate the vision and focus of your clients or visitors out into the garden. And we've looked at a couple of these, but we're going to take a closer look at them now and kind of walk our way through it and just reinforce what radial design approach is. And I particularly really like this. But one aspect of it is you've got to have a fair amount of room for it to really take effect. So a fairly long yard and wide, even if it's an odd shaped property line, you want to have enough room to where the arcs and the enjoined circles and expansion of this particular design approach can really come into full fruition. Okay, let's take a look at radial design. This is an example of a radial or concentric circle design. One of my students did a few years back for a project that we were doing in class. And what she did was we've got the house depicted right here, and she established a fire pit right here in the center and used that where the point of her compass would be plopped into her concept plan, and all of these different arcs that you're seeing in this design, even the garden beds that are laid out over at this area here, all of these relate right back to the center of this radial design. All of the walls, stairs, arbors, all of the elements, if the lines were extended, they would come right back into the center, even along the garden edge here, right back to that particular location. And that's the strength of a radial design. It really helps to open things up because as you look at this, the pathways get broader as you go out. Here's a pathway that swings around conceptual plan with trees showing some ideas for shade. Arbor, another arbor and sitting area. And even though the property itself is kind of an odd angle, the composition holds together very, very well. It brings you out. You swing around on this arc, you radiate it out again. This would come right back into the center right in here to this dining area that she has. It comes around up an arbor that's underneath this conceptual tree right here in this corner. And the way she layered her colors, this was all hand drawn. Then the arbor becomes subservient to the tree, which is going over the top of it, radiates back in and around. And at this point, she actually dropped more into a rectangular design just because we were isolated now. But everything flows from the center out and from the extremities, the areas back in. So this is an excellent example of a radial or concentric circle design. One more example of a concentric circle design. This is what I did in England about 30 years ago. And when I was studying, and again, the existing birch tree became the focal point or the center of my design. And all of these elements, the extended radius, the arch circumference, the arbors going over a pathway, seating areas, hedges, and all of these extended radius would come right back to the center of this circle right there at that birch tree, and it radiates out. And by simply altering where the hedges come in, you give interest and movement to the garden. You come through, it opens up comes across, I stopped at this point. Again, all hand drawn, but just a simple example of a concentric circle design. And I've mentioned you can have design approach. You can have two different approach on the same property. And down in the front area, I actually used a rectangular design because of the architecture of the home and the space, it made more sense. So I did a rectangular design in the front swung around and came right into a concentric or radial design in the backyard. So a very powerful design approach, but it keeps my form composition. It keeps all the elements of my design flowing and working together. So we've had the opportunity to look at a couple of different radial designs, one that I did in England when I was studying, and one that one of my students did a few years ago, as well. And they both have strong points. The student she did a beautiful job on hers, and it really pulls you out into the garden. And yet, because of the form composition, it can still tie everything together very, very strongly. So if you have the opportunity, if you have a large enough property or you just want to give it a shot, you know, whether you have a central fountain in a courtyard or some kind of a piece of art that you could use as a focal point at that very center of this design approach, give it a try and see what you come up with. It can be a lot of fun, and it can create a lot of interest, particularly when you use those planes of enclosure, and once you've established that base plane, that circular concentric circle design, then you can come back in with your vertical and overhead planes to give more interest to your design composition overall. Okay, that's number four, and we're going to go on into curvilinear design, and we'll wrap up our five main design approaches that we work with. Okay. I'll see you in a bit. 14. Curvilinear Design Approach: Okay, we're coming into our fifth and final design approach that we typically use in garden design. And this is curve linear or be considered naturalistic design. And this is what most people enjoy trying to draw and working with. And curvlinear design is a very natural approach to landscape. You've got these sweeping arcs and curves, moving people down pathways that are curving, and all that is great. And doing the landscape in curve llinear is great, as well. But to be really effective, you've got to have a fair amount of room to have these arcs being really effective. So typically, I will start with a rectangular or rectangular 45 design. I might do a radial design. I will do curve linear. But we're going to talk about something called the rule of thirds, and we'll see an example of that here in just a moment where we're going to be working with different design approach in the backyard. If we've got enough room to do curvlinear, then we want to reinforce the architecture of the home and then transition our way out into the landscape. So with all that said, let's take a look at a couple of different designs that are curvilinear in nature, but combine design approach, as far as rectangular closer to the house to reinforce that layout and that structure. So let's take a quick look at this. So we looked at this design earlier and we talked about how we had a rectangular design approach, arc and tangent, rectangular 45, and then curve linear. Well, let's take a look at another application of working curve linear into a garden design. So in this one, again, we are reinforcing the architecture of the house by having rectangular design approach around the building itself. And then at this upper stone terrace, we're coming out, and we're actually dropping into a radial design approach where we would have a center point roughly right about here. And now we've got an arc or a radius coming out the sides of the fountain and the stairway and even the stone landing down here at the bottom, all of these lines would project directly back to that center point. So that's where it's concentric circle or radial design approach. So the curves start to soften the composition out. We've got our landing. And now, this edge of the landing becomes a tangent line into this arc right here. And because the property is deep enough and wide enough, we can come in and do a nice smooth arc to form a curvlinear design approach. Component parts still fitting together. We're still coming down, and the landing in front of the summer house becomes a tangent. Now we can come across. We can come up on this tangent into the ark under these proposed trees, and it swings around. And as we come off of this arc right here, we're coming back into a tangent line coming straight into this arc, which if this circle was completed all the way around, the center point would be somewhere right around in here, and now we've got a tangent line that we could physically project straight into this. So again, radius, extended radius, arc tangent into the component parts of all of the different shapes we're working with. Again, we've got rectangular, radial and curvilinear design approach within one property because the property is large enough to segue from the formality of the home to a softer approach to a very soft naturalistic approach, we ignore the property lines themselves, plantings, massed plantings, trees are going to blur all of this. What we want to do is form a good solid design composition right here in the middle of the property to where we have a good solid garden design that we can plant out and have those plantings reinforce what our overall design approach is. Okay, so that's pretty much curvilinear right there. Well, there we have it. That's the end of curvilinear, and we've looked at five different design approach and how you can combine a different design approach on the same property, even in the same backyard, as long as you pay attention to that form composition and how the component parts of shapes relate to one another to where you have a nice, flowing, cohesive design solution. And once you get this under your belt, then you're going to be able to really move ahead with doing good solid garden design. Now, there's some other aspects of design that we're going to be touching on as we go on through the course. But for now, that was design approach. And so thank you for watching, and we'll see you in a bit. Let's take a short break, and then we're going to move on. 15. Introduction to Design Principles: Well, we've covered a lot of ground, and we've gone through the component parts of our shapes that we use in design. We've talked about form composition, and we've gone through the design approach that we typically get started with and how we can use those in our garden designs. So now what we want to do is come in with something that's going to help to bind all of this together. And that's what we refer to as our design principles. Our design principles are defined by unity, order, and rhythm, and we're going to take a look at each of these in turn. So that said, let's just go ahead and just jump straight into it. And once we get this, then we're going to be able to actually get started with how to develop a conceptual plan. Okay, let's take a look at unity. 16. Unity in Garden Design: Okay, we're going to start talking design principles. And as I mentioned before, we have three basic design principles that we're going to be looking at, and those consist of unity, order, and rhythm, and how they pertain to garden design. Now, in this lesson, we're going to take a look at unity and to create unity and undivided holistic effect to our garden, we're going to use four subcategories to the unification process. And those four subcategories consist of dominance. We want to create a dominant area, a dominant theme in our garden. If we don't have dominance, the eye tends to wonder. And if you think about going into an office space where everybody has a ten foot cubicle that they walk or that they work in there is no dominance, and your eye just kind of tends to wonder as a result of that. So we want to create dominance within our composition when we're first drawing out our conceptual plan and working with our ideas. We also want to use repetition because as you repeat elements in your design, then it tends to unify visually your garden together. And we're going to be looking at some examples of this as well. Interconnection means, rather than just having an element and an element side by side, then we're going to interconnect them. So kind of like interweaving my fingers together, I'm going to take the composition, and I'm going to blend it together and overlap different portions of my design composition together to create an interconnected whole. And I would do the same in planting design where I'm going to have plants that interconnect and flow around each other to create a visually pleasing composition. So dominance, repetition, interconnection, and then we're going to talk about the unity of three and how that pertains to garden design as well. So for right now, let's go ahead and take a look at some photographs to illustrate what I'm talking about. Okay, let's talk about dominance in garden design. And in this instance, we want to establish a dominant space so the eye doesn't wonder. We've come through an arbor into the private garden. We've got the same stone unifying the garden together. But the main pedestrian walkway brings you to the front door. And because we were able to come up a step at the entry and a step right here, we were able to drop back down 12 " to create a sunken resting and seating area here in this front garden. Plenty of room for a small table and chairs for relaxing. So we have a dominant space in this area here, but we also have a dominant element in that we have a water feature, which when you come in off of the driveway becomes a visual draw pulling you in. The colors of the walls pick up the colors of the stone, as well as the colors up into the roof tiles. So everything works together to pull you in, keep the pedestrian area away from the conversational and relaxing area here. But we can do dominance in other ways, and we can accomplish that by having a large turf area, a large lawn area, which wrapping around with a very naturalistic planting, we've got this planted on a perm, so you've got a vertical element happening, and the way the lawn wraps around, it pulls you down through this pathway, and it makes you want to go and explore and see where it takes you. So let's take a quick look at repetition. Repetition is simply repeating the same element or similar elements in the garden. In this instance, it's lavender going down on each side of the grass path. We have a symmetrical design in that we have two Italian cypress at this location and then trimmed boxwood on each side. And then the large hedge is a backdrop with an arch pruned or carved out of it. And then as you look down through, you've got pale yellow flowers in this foliage down here, which are a nice complement to the purples of the lavender. So we've got repetition here, and we can achieve repetition with urns and hardscape elements. So here we have urn and urn. We have urns on each side. We've got a water rill running down, which leads to a pool down here at the very bottom. And then the paving material changes from a gravel or sand to stone to gravel and back to stone leading to the entry to the home. Stone columns are another great way of having not just repetition and a structural element, but it also gives you a good strong vertical element and then a support for the overhead plane, in this case, a rose arbor. One more look at this composition, and we have repetition in the plant material where we have Lamb's ear, the Stikes repeated at this location, the day lies repeated at this location. So visually, it draws your eye all the way down right here to where you want to exit. Interconnection and interconnection is just taking our form composition and wrapping our shapes around each other. So in this instance, the concrete stepping stones come in, the deck wraps around them, and the boards are laid at a 45 to give a more dramatic and dynamic feel to it. So if we look at this quick composition, this quick diagram on the left, the lawn area is not defined. The patio or the hardscape areas are just floating. Nothing is interconnected. Nothing is tied together. But if we take those same elements and simply put a border around the turf area, then that starts to tie that and give it definition. Now we can bring the paved areas and connect them to the turf area. This area. Now we can add a backdrop of some kind of a screen or trellis, and then the plantings are all interconnected. So you have a much stronger composition than what we see on the left. So when we're talking about the unity of three in garden design, what we're looking at is kind of a practical application. So let's look at hardscape materials. For an example. In my garden, I'm using no more than three different hardscape materials. So in landscape design composition, I'm not going to use more than three different hardscape materials. Even if they're not side by side or interconnected, if I have a large enough property, I may go ahead and use brick near the house. And then if I have another location where I want a more permanent setup and a solid floor, I could use brick again. I'm repeating that material out into the garden, even if they're not visually within sight of each other. I'm going to use timber as an example. So brick and timber and maybe concrete or decomposed granite or gravel. These would be the elements that I would work with, but I don't want to keep adding more and disparate materials into my composition because I want to have that sense of unification, that sense of unity, and I can achieve that by limiting the amount of hardscape materials and then create repetition by reusing them throughout the garden as I deem necessary. Now, in some cases, if the garden is large enough, you could go to a fourth material, but that fourth material, in my mind, would be just natural surfacing, a dirt path, pine needles, maybe some brick or bark chips that would be out. So that would constitute potentially a fourth hard scape or fourth flooring element. But each of these elements is also going to give you an indication of the space that you're within. Brick slightly more formal, maybe close to the house or a more permanent area, say, a gazebo idea somewhere out in the garden, timber a little less formal but durable, and then bark chips or soil or pine needles or even lawn is going to give a different feel to where you're at within the garden. The same is going to be true overall of planting design. And I don't mean that we would limit our plants to just three species, but I would group them in odd numbers three, five, seven, that idea, because it becomes more dynamic than just having an equal number of plants, say on each side. The exception being, if you want to reinforce movement walking down a pathway, as we've seen with some of the hedges in the earlier examples, the photos that we were just looking at. And we're going to talk about planting design principles in another lecture later on in the course. So anyway, that's our first design principle of unity, and now we're going to go ahead and we'll take a break and then we'll take a look at how we can achieve order in our design composition. And that'll be our second design principle. Okay. I'll see you in a bit. 17. Order in Garden Design: Okay, let's take a look at our second design principle, which is order in garden design. And what we want to do is order can be conceived as the underlying framework of our design, and we want to create visual order for ourselves, for whoever we're designing the garden for. And we're going to start, as always, designing on the base plane, and we're going to experiment with form composition and design approach. As long as we hold to these two principles, then it's going to create visual order on this base plane. We still want to have a harmonious unification overall, so we're going to pay attention to what we discussed under unity as far as dominance, repetition, interconnection, and that unity of three. To create order in our design, now we want to start looking at three other subcategories, and that's going to be asymmetrical design, symmetrical design, and then mass collection or mass plantings. And a lot of this symmetrical, asymmetrical and mass collection. Will relate to planting design, which, again, we're going to have a lesson on that further on in the course. But we're going to take a look at a couple of different designs and then a couple of photographs and just get a feel for how form composition and design approach can work together and then layer this up with mass collection and our symmetrical or asymmetrical design solutions. Because these design principles are aesthetic guidelines to make our gardens more approachable and of greater interest to ourselves and to whoever we're designing the garden for. So let's go ahead and just take a look at a couple of different designs that I think will help to clarify this. Okay, let's take a look at a rectangular 45 design approach, and we've got a strong architectural element here on the house itself with windows looking out viewing into the garden. So the timber, brick and stone terrace have all been designed to reflect the architecture of the house. And as you come off of this formal brick and stone terracing, you're coming down the steps and you're coming into gravel pathways. And that's going to have a direct influence on how you perceive that space. Gravel is going to be much more casual, much more naturalistic, and you can bring this around. And it doesn't have to be gravel. It could be bare earth, it could be bark chips, it could be decomposed granite. But you've got a strong form composition and a strong design approach that holds this together visually. You have good, strong visual order by taking this approach. Now you're coming in with conceptual plantings that will blur these straight lines and make it more interesting overall. It brings you deeper into the garden. You have an exit out of the property to a utility area. You have hedging that helps to screen some of this. But you turn the corner and you come back underneath a graveled area and where you can exit back into the lawn or turf area and you can exit and get back onto the gravel area in here, where plantings are helping to define the walking area. This is also an asymmetrical planting design in that you've got a large mass tree, a very large tree on this side, which visually is balanced by the plantings on this side of the composition and the fact that we have a timber, arbor, or pergola over reaching the pathway along here. Same idea. We've got mass plantings here, and then another tree on this side with a seat underneath it, and then plantings. So visually, it's in balance. The weight on this side is balanced with the mass of plantings on this side. So this is a good, strong example of a rectangular 45 degree design approach with good visual order. In this example, we're taking a look at a radial design, so it doesn't have any relation to the architecture of the home, but it does focus your eye out into the lawn and you've got a stepped lawn with brick. So you're coming out. You've got brick edging. You've got some plantings to help frame it. Everything in this composition radiates right from the center of this circle out to create the pergola, the arbors that are coming out over the top of the timber decking. The timber decking comes up, swings over radius, swings up extended radius, and then the circumference coming around. So there's strong interconnection between all of this. And even where you have a summer house or pergola, the circumference of this composition would go right through the center of this summer house to where these component parts are all sticking together. And again, we have asymmetrical planting design in this composition as well. So now let's take a look at a photograph of a rectangular design approach. And in this one, we've got a very strong visual composition in visual order. Everything's tied together. Everything is interconnected. Wrapping around. The bluestone flags are laid at a 45 degree angle, but where the border is and where the steps start, they go to a rectangular design. And visually, this tells you there's something different happening at this location. You've got the border for the natural pool. You've got the border for the lap pool, the swimming pool. But you also have change in elevation. So having a change of pattern is going to be a visual clue that something is changing as you drop down, then you go back into the 45 degree. So you've got repetition from here to this surface, down here. You have mass plantings of grasses on this side, where the color of the grass is reflected by the color of the flowers at this location and then down at this location as well. So you have repetition in the plantings. And you have more mass plantings along the edge of the pool reinforcing that linear lap pool effect going all the way down, more yellow balancing out and giving balance to these elements in the garden. So again, using a minimum number of plants and repeating them helps to create visual order in our garden. But what about a symmetrical design solution? Well, in this one, we've got a perfect balance in what we have privet hedge on this side, a privet hedge on this side. The stone or the brick walkways are identical. They're mirrored on each side. The water real goes up through the middle and to the fountain head, which where the water would emanate from right here. And then we have Italian Cypress mirroring on each side and framing the view, framing the view looking up to the house, but also framing the view from the house out, and the architecture of the home is also in perfect symmetry. You've got dormers on this side, dormers on this side. You've got a fireplace. There's another fireplace hidden by the cypress over here, and then the door, the entry is right here in the middle. So everything is right on this axis. So just some quick looks at different design approach, different mass plantings, form composition, component parts all working together to create order, visual order and asymmetrical and symmetrical planting. Okay, so just some quick examples of how you can create visual order, keeping order in our garden design compositions and how form composition and design approach really go a long ways in creating that base plane visual order to our composition to our design solution. Now we bring plants in and use them to create more visual balance, more visual order, as far as asymmetrical or symmetrical garden design, you know, plantings, using mass plantings to reinforce the linear aspects of the lap pool and minimizing the number of plants. We're creating a garden and not a botanical garden. So we want this to be as aesthetically pleasing as possible. And again, repetition will help to unify our composition, creating dominance, whether it be in the lawn area and that rectangular 45 design that we saw the lap pool and the photograph that we were looking at we're going to create dominance within the garden. Then we're going to create repetition to kind of keep all of our elements fitting together, and then interconnection where everything wraps around each other. And then finally in asymmetrical design in particular, looking at that unity of odd numbers and balancing it visually with the weight of the plants and the different colors of plants are going to have a visual weight to them. So a deep dark conifer or shrub is going to visually have more weight than of lighter colored shrub. So we want to play with these aspects. We'll discuss this more in the planting design lesson coming up. So that's order in garden design, and next we're going to take a look at rhythm and how that plays into this. So I'll see you in a bit. 18. Rhythm in Garden Design: So unity and order refer to the composition of our design. Rhythm, on the other hand, is referring to time and movement within the garden. When we enter a landscape, we're seeing it over a period of time and at different views. These views are seen in sequence, and mentally, we start to form patterns. So as designers, we want to create patterns in our gardens and our landscapes because then this is going to create rhythm. And we're going to do this using four different but related visual pattern approaches. And those are repetition, alternation, inversion, and gradation. So we've talked about repetition a little bit in the last two lectures. So repetition, again, is just taking an element or a grouping of elements and repeating them in an obvious sequence that creates rhythm and continuity within the garden. It can be done with paving materials, say patterns in a brick walkway, and it's most commonly done in planting design as well. So let's just take a look at a couple of examples of what repetition can achieve in garden design. So let's look at repetition in planting design. And in this design, we've got stacks, the amsir right here in the foreground, and we've repeated this on down the line where you can see the gray plantings about two thirds the way along this border. And this creates a visual unity. You see the repetition of the plant material of the color, and you've got a visual continuity and a visual unity within this border. And it can also be used in paving materials. And here's a combination of planting design and paving selection. And in this one, of course, the white flowering azaleas are receding into the distance as they get further from us, they tend to close in a little bit more onto the pathway. This creates a bit of tension and perspective, and then the running bond pattern of the brick, that's a dynamic pattern, and it's repeated all the way along, so now it becomes a visual stimulation and tends to move you down through the garden as well. Whether it be paving materials or plant materials, repetition can do a wonderful job in creating movement in the garden. So repetition is pretty easy to envision and pretty easy to implement into your garden design. So let's look at alternation because this is going to make it a little more dynamic. And alternation is simply taking that repeating pattern, but now we're going to alternate patterns or sequences within that to give it more interest. And it's going to be a lot easier to show this to you than to try to walk you through it. So let's look at some examples that I've drawn up. This example, I've taken alternation and I've drawn three different diagrams to explain this. In the top diagram, we have a rock wall, but I have alternated rather than making it just a solid rock wall with a brick cap, what I've suggested is a rock wall with iron fence panels in between. We're alternating these elements. It's still a repetitive pattern, but they're alternating between the rock and the iron panels. In the middle example, it's an example of alternation with plant form. So whereas I might have a pyramidal tree, say, a spruce, and then I'm going to alternate and bring in some kind of hedging material in between. So this could be on a formal pathway or some other application. But I'm taking these elements and I'm alternating between the pyramidal of the tree form and the softer or maybe the clipped boxwood hedging and creating a sequential pattern, a repetitive pattern, and alternating. And finally, you can do the same thing with colors. And if you're designing a perennial border, then it's nice to be able to bring in a repetitive fashion to it. And you can do this with a triad of colors. And in this instance, I'm using a triad of yellow, red and blue, and then repeating it, yellow, red and blue. Species don't necessarily have to be the same, but the colors create that sequential pattern. The colors create the rhythm that tends to make your eye or help your eye just skip down along a perennial border. And then of course, in a real perennial border, you would have different plants in the background, maybe some deep greens to set this off. But these colors are going to be what move the eye down along that border. And that's what I mean by using alternation to create more interest in your garden design. So now let's take a look at what inversion would entail. So now let's look at our third way of creating rhythm, and that's using inversion. And inversion is simply it's going to primarily be used in hard scape materials, paving, such like that. But what we're doing is we're starting with a pattern, and then say we have concrete with a brick border to it, and then add an obvious sequence, we're going to invert that pattern. And instead of having a brick border and a concrete interior, we might switch it and invert it to where it's a brick interior and a concrete border around or any other combination of materials. So I've drawn up a quick example that we can take a look at just to kind of give you an idea of what inversion can do in your garden design solution. So in this example of inversion, we have a stone walkway coming into a house, and this stone walkway has a brick pattern around the edge or a brick border on the edge of it, and then it's flanked with some boxwood hedging or some kind of hedging material. So that's the walkway coming in. As you get to the landing, the front porch, what inversion is stating is that now instead of the stone being the main pathway and the brick being the edging, now the brick is the main surface and the stone is now the edging or the border all the way around. So I have taken these elements and I have inverted them. I changed them out and said, as you're coming in, you're on a stone path and you step up onto the patio and now on the patio, you are on a brick patio and there is a stone border around it. So that's just a simple explanation of what inversion is, but it can be very, very effective if you're bringing people down a walkway and then you want them to get to a landing point, a standing point where they're going to rest and wait to be accepted into the house or a sitting area, something that tells them that this space is different. So that's inversion. Let's look at gradation. So here are two different examples of what I mean by gradation. One is using plant material and the other is architectural. And so in the upper drawing, I have a typical planting scheme, and this is something that you would be doing in your own gardens or for a client, where you have the lower plant material in the foreground, and as you reced from the viewer towards the property line or towards the fence line, then the plant material is going to get taller and taller to create this gradual climb or gradation of height. This can be accomplished as well by having earthen berms that the plant material is planted on where it would climb and then drop down on the far side of the berm. In the lower drawing, I have fence panels and the fence panels are gradually getting higher from about a four foot fence panel at the far left to approximately a six or eight foot fence panel on the far right. I've also put a little alternation into the fence panels in that they go from a horizontal to a 45 degree pattern for the slats. Gradation in a profile view. In this example, this is a design I did for some clients a number of years ago, and this is a conceptual plan. But I had a rectangular design approach right around the house there at the bottom of the screen. And as you start to work your way out and you can see this snake pattern pathway leading away from the house towards the top of the picture, and so it's dropped into a curvilinear design. But as you follow this path out, it gets narrower and narrower until you finally have that circular area with a fire pit at the very top. What I'm doing in this particular instance is from the scale of the drawing, the pathway is wide enough as you leave the house for two people to walk side by side. But as you get closer to the circular area at the top, I narrowed it down and I did this deliberately because I wanted the people to physically have to fall back behind each other, they end up going in single file and enter that rounded sitting area individually. And I did that on purpose because I wanted them to come in and experience that particular portion of the garden individually and then they can turn and talk to each other about it. So there's four different ways to create visual rhythm within your garden design. Repetition, alternation, inversion, and gradation and how you combine and interconnect these principles to create this visual rhythm or what going to give your garden design much more interest and much more dynamic presentation. So create rhythm, create movement, encourage people to go out into the garden and explore it. Where does this path lead to? Gradation can hide how a path swirls around to the backside of a perm or a different part of the garden. Encourage people to move out through there by using alternating paving patterns, and then invert that where you have a dynamic pattern going down along a pathway. And when you get to a seating area or a spot to rest, change it to a more static pattern, invert that and slow people down. Practice with this, see what you can do in your own yard or on designs that you may already be working with. But using these principles are what going to make your designs or any designs much more interesting, much more dynamic, and pull people into the garden, which is what we want to do. So that pretty well wraps up design principles. And so let's take a break, and I'll see you in the next lecture. 19. Drawing to Scale Imperial: Okay, so let's talk about how to use and read the scale rule. And the scale rule is just simply a way of taking real world proportions of your property that you're working on and shrinking it down proportionately to where it will fit onto the size paper that you're drawing your design on. Now, here in the States, we use imperial measurements, meaning feet and inches. If you're using metric, then you're going to be converting centimeters to meters. But the procedures going to be the same. Now, if you're using metric measurements, you may want to skip this particular lesson altogether and just jump to the next one where I talk about using the scale rule in metric values. So what we're going to do in this lesson is we're going to talk about how to determine which scale value you're going to want to use on your drawing. Now, here in the States, the most common is eighth inch or quarter inch scale. Eighth inch scale simply means that an eighth of an inch equals 1 ft or 1 " equals eight feet. Quarter inch scale is twice as big. So it just simply means a quarter of an inch equals a foot or there are four feet in an inch. So in this example, I'm going to be using 11 by 17 inch paper. But whether you're using 11 by 17, 18 by 24 or 24 by 36, the procedure is going to be the same to determine which scale value you can use on the sheet of paper based on the dimensions of the property and based on the size of the paper that you're working with. Now, this assumes that you've done a site survey or you have been provided a plot site plan of the property that may be dimensioned but not drawn to scale. If you're not familiar with how to do site surveys, then I'll have another class stand alone on how to do the site surveys. So you may want to take a look at that when it comes available. So anyway, let's go ahead and jump over to the board, and we'll take a look at how to determine the scale value for your project that you're going to need is to have your site survey with all of your dimensions listed on it from when you're out in the field. And so you're going to have that as your reference point. Now, let's look at the paper. This is an 11 by 17, and 11 by 17 is the full dimension of the paper from edge to edge, side to side and top to bottom. But if you look at this, I've got room in here for a title block where I can fill in information on my name for the designer, who designed it, or, um, who the client is, the date, and then a space for the scale itself. And so because I've got this title block, and I also have a drawing border that goes all the way around the edge of the paper, that means my actual drawing area is not 11 by 17. It's going to be a little bit smaller. And that's going to be true of your other paper sizes as well, 18 by 24 and 24 by 36. So if I want to know what my actual dimensions that I can work within are, First off, I'm going to measure the inside of my drawing area, border to border. And I've got an area that's about 15.5 " side to side that I can draw within. And from bottom to top, it's measuring 10.5 ". So if I take my calculator and I just say 15.5 " times eight feet to the inch gives me an area of 124 linear feet side to side that I could work with as far as a property is concerned. And I'm just going to write that down. And then top to bottom, it measured 10.5 ", and I'll take that times eight because I'm speculating that I'll be working at eighth inch scale on this size paper. And that gives me a value of 84 feet. So I could have at the eighth inch scale, a property that measures 124 by 84 feet side to side, top to bottom. But that would also take me directly to the edges of my drawing border. And you never want to draw directly to the edge. It doesn't look professional. You want to stay in at least about half an inch all the way around. Well, on the eighth inch scale, half an inch is four feet because there's four feet to the inch. So I'm actually going to be down a little bit from that 124 by 84. And if I wanted to try to use quarter inch scale, well, that's four feet to the inch, so it's twice as big. And I'd simply take this 124 by 84 and divide it in half, and that would give me my value. And again, you do this with all of your paper sizes. Now, if we come back to our site survey, I can start adding up my linear measurements all the way across, including this bit of decking coming out here at the back and my measurements from the front of the house to the back of the house. And once I know what my dimensions are for the house property, and I already know I can have a property that can go up to about 116 feet because I'm going to stay in from my drawing borders, then that'll tell me what size scale is going to be most appropriate for this particular drawing. And I'll use the calculator again to add this up. But before we get too far into that, I've got a 16 foot piece of decking right here. And then from the deck over to the corner of the stairs is 13 feet 10 ". The width of the stairs is four feet 6 ". The width of this little bit of bay window is four feet 2 ". And rather than trying to add up all the feet and then add up all the inches and dividing by 12 to get the foot equivalent and coming back and doing the math, I'm going to do a simple conversion and convert these inch values, 10 ", 6 ", and so on, to a decimal value. So I've developed a little chart here or put together a little chart that simply converts the inch value, 1 ", two inch, three inch, and so on into an equivalent of feet. In short, I'm saying that 1 " is equal to 0.08 feet. 2 " is equal to 0.17 feet. And I've done this by simply taking the part 1 " divided by the whole 12 " in a foot, and that gives me a decimal equivalent. So where I was mentioning that this bit of the bay window was four feet 2 ", that would be the same as 4.17 feet. 13 feet 10 " would be 13.83 feet. And now I can do my math really easily. And I'll just keeping that chart handy right there and using my calculator. I've got 16 feet for the decking. I've got 13 feet 10 ", so I've got 13.83 feet. Then I've got four feet 6 ". Well, that would be 4.5 feet. And then I've got a 12 foot total. And you'll notice I'm not stopping and picking up these different running measurements of where the window starts and stops. I just want to know what my total dimensions are from the left side to the right hand side of this property. Now I've got this bay window coming out. And because these are on a 45, they're not going to give me the full four feet 2 ", but they're going to be about probably taking up about three feet of horizontal or linear dimension right across here. But I know I have four feet 2 " at the front of the bay window at this location, and 2 " is 0.17 feet. So I'll go ahead and go 4.17 plus. And I'm just going to guestimate these are about three feet each. So three plus three plus now we're turning and coming straight back. I'll ignore that. And I'm coming out this way. I've got 1 ft 2 " or actually, I've got four feet 2 " all the way from the house wall to the end here. So that's another 4.17 feet. And that gives me a total dimension across the property of 60.67 feet or real close to 60 feet 8 " because 8 " is 0.66 feet. So I'm going to call it 60 1 ft side to side. And front to back, I can come back and do the exact same thing again. I've got eight feet of a dimension for this stairwell. And that stairwell is even with this corner. And also here. So I've got 34 feet, 4 ", 4 " is 0.33 feet. So I'm going to go plus 34.33, and then my house kicks out three feet right here at the back. So I'll add three feet in there, and that kicks out four feet, so that's three feet. That's four feet, so I'm just going to add 1 ft onto that. And then these stairs right here are two feet, so two plus. So my total dimensions front to back of the house come out to be 48.33 feet or 48 feet 4 ". So you see how simple it is to be able to go back and forth with this conversion and switching your inches to a decimal factor. So those are the dimensions that I have to work with. And I know that quarter inch scale, I only have 84 feet on the eight inch scales top to bottom. At quarter inch scale, that'd be 42 feet border to border. So I'm going to have to use eighth inch scale for this particular drawing. So that's how we've determined how to choose the scale value, eighth inch or quarter inch for the size of the property or the size and the size of the paper that you're working on. So now that we can determine that and know that our drawing is going to fit on our sheet of paper, then we'll take a look at actually plotting up a survey to walk us through that procedure in a couple of lessons from now, we're going to take a look at the metric scale in the next one. Okay, thanks for watching, and let's take a break, and I'll see you in a bit. 20. Drawing to Scale Metric: The metric rule is what probably most of the world is using out there, and the most common scales on the metric rule that we're going to be using in residential garden design are the one to 50 or the one to 100. So what does that mean? Well, when you're looking at your paper and you're looking at the rule, this is a ratio one to 50 or one to 100. 1 centimeter on your paper, measuring the length of a line on your paper is going to equal 50 centimeters or half a meter on the real world, in the real world. So at the one to 50 scale, 1 centimeter on the paper equals 50 centimeters or half a meter of real world measurement. So it would take 2 centimeters to equal 1 meter 2 centimeters on your paper to equal 1 meter of real world measurement. With the one to 100, it's twice as small. It's half the size, so it is going to be 1 centimeter on your paper is going to be equal to 100 centimeters or 1 meter on the ground. Now, typically, a property of about 1,000 square meters or less is going to be a good size to use a one to 50 ratio, a one to 50 scale. And I'm always drawing on a 24 by 36 inch sheet of paper, and that's going to be pretty close to the equivalent of an A one sheet of paper in metric sizing. So I can take 1,000 square meter property, and at a one to 50 scale, I can fit that onto my A one sheet and have plenty of room to have any kind of notes or plant legends or any other information I may need to have on this. Now, a one to 100 is going to be more suitable at the same sheet size, A one for larger properties, say about a quarter of an acre to five acres, which would be the equivalent of about a tenth of a hectar to what? Two hectars. And there's even a one to 500 scale where 1 centimeter on the paper is the equivalent of 500 centimeters on the ground or 5 meters. So if you had a very large property anywhere from two hectars up to 40 hectars, then you're going to want to use that, and that would be more applicable for doing an overall site plan. And then for detailed drawing, you would take separate sheets of paper and different views of your property of your plan view, and you would use a one to 50 or a one to 100 and blow that up to where you could get more detail into it. So I have a drawing here on the board that I did a few years ago in England, and it is in metric. And so let's take a look at this. So here's this radial design that I did a number of years ago, and this is an A one sheet of paper. And in the real world, this property measures side to side, about 39 meters by about 39 meters. So I am using a one to 100 scale. So at that, so I've got one to 100. And if I tried to use back up here, one to 100 on the scale, I can go up to 30 meters on this run. So I can measure up to 30 meters at one to 100. At one to 50, it's twice as large. I can only measure 15 meters. If I tried to draw this property at one to 50, it's too big a property. It wouldn't fit on this sheet of paper. So one to 100 makes that just right. Now, if I want to know the length of this piece of brick along this stretch of the driveway, I can take my one to 100 I'm going to set it right there like that. And I'm going to measure 1 meter, two, three, four, five, and now I'm going to have increments of the meter or the centimeters. So it's going to be 5.5, six, seven. It looks like about 5.8 meters for this stretch. So when I'm measuring the house, I'm using a metric rule, a metric tape measure. And I'm going to measure the property just like I would in any other normal situation. I'm going to write those values down. The length of this wall is 5 meters. The length of this next wall is 3.5 meters, whatever it might be. And I'll make those measurements. I'll record all of that information. I'll come back in, like I said, I always work on an A one equivalent sheet. So I'm going to determine based on the overall dimensions of my property, what's going to fit easier, the one by 100 or the one to 50. And then I'm going to select that, and I'm simply going to do a direct read and use my triangle and my parallel edge to create this house and then triangulation using the same processes we've been talking about to get this information onto my paper. 21. Plotting Your Survey: Okay, so we have looked at how to use the scale rule using imperial values, feet and inches. We've looked at how to use the scale rule, the metric scale, and we've seen how to determine what scale you should use based on the size of your project and the size of the paper that you're going to be designing on that you'll be drawing on. So now in this short lesson, we're going to take a look at how it'd get started on actually plotting up a site survey. And we're going to use the same survey that I used a couple of lessons back and just walk our way through how to take a look at your actual notes that you would have taken in the field and then drawing it up on our paper. So anyway, that's where we're going to go with this lesson, and it's going to be pretty quick. It's just an example of how I'd get started using my drafting equipment and starting to draw up this design. So let's take a quick look. So just a quick refresher. Remember that on eighth inch scale, we're going to be using this upper line, the smaller line of numbers. And we're always starting from the zero mark and reading from left to right. So four feet, five, six, seven, eight feet or 1 ", and then so on up 12 feet, 16 feet and on. These larger numbers below, reading from right to left in increasing value, 40, 42, and so on, those relate to the quarter inch scale, which starts at the other end of the scale rule. I just move this down. So the quarter inch scale. Here we're working from right to left with zero, two, four, six. And what you're going to want to be aware of and careful of is when you are using either of these scales, make sure that when you read a value, you are indeed reading either the eighth inch value all the way across or the quarter inch all the way across. It's very easy to think you're reading 36 feet on the eighth inch scale because you've just made a slight mistake. So just be aware of that. And now we're going to take a look at actually starting to plot this survey onto our paper. So here's my paper, and I'm just going to bring my parallel edge up and I'm going to start my line coming across. Then I'm going to take my drafting triangle, and I'm going to do the same thing again and draw a vertical line going up. These are my two lines that are technically wild. Using my eighth inch scale and constantly referring back to my site survey, I know that from the corner of my deck to the house is 16 feet. Well, the corner of my deck is going to be right here for my purposes, and I will measure 16 feet on the eighth inch scale. And that puts me right here. And I can draw in another line to represent the house wall. This is my deck area. This is the house here. Then I know that from the corner of the house and where the deck meets to the corner of my stairs is 13 feet 10 ". So remember, on the eighth inch scale, each of these little individual marks represents 2 " so that there's six marks and there's 12 " and a foot. So I'm going to simply set this. I'm going to hold 13 foot on this vertical line here. And I'm going to come over to where my zero is, and then I'm going to go in five little tick marks, and that's going to put me at what would be 13 feet 10 ". That's where my stairs are coming down. So I'll draw a wild line coming down. And I just keep referring back and forth. So my stairs are four feet 6 " wide, and then I've got 12 feet to where the bay window comes out. So I'm just going to go ahead and measure four feet 6 " across the face. I'm not going to worry about the length right now. It's 12 feet to where the bay windows are. And then at that point, I've got this bay window coming out at a 45 degree and wrapping around. So I'm just going to set my triangle to where the 45 degree angle is right at that little mark, and I'm going to draw my line wild. That particular stretch of the bay window is four feet 2 ". So I'll go to four feet 2 ". Then I'll come back, draw my horizontal. That also was four feet 2 ". I go to there, and then turning my triangle and keeping it snug to my parallel edge, I'll roll this over. Bring it back. And at that point, my house wall is going back 34 feet 4 ". Well, I'll just come over, set this and run a wild line going up. So that's just kind of a quick overview on plotting up a typical site survey and getting started with that. So anyway, that's it for this. And now I think we're ready to go on to actually working with a conceptual plan. Okay, thanks for watching. Let's take a break, and I'll see you back here in a bit. 22. The Conceptual Plan Part One: Well, we've covered a lot of ground up to this point, but we're finally to the point where we're going to start looking at developing the conceptual plan. So just a quick overview. The conceptual plan is your ideas for how to develop the design solution for any piece of property, whether it's your own place or that of a client or a friend. The idea of this is to get ideas on paper that you can take to whoever you're presenting this to and say, Here's my design solution. Here's the direction I'd like to go with this. And at this point in time, we're putting plant graphics into it, but we don't need to know exactly which plant species it's going to be. We want the client or our friends or family to be able to buy into the overall layout of the garden. And once that's established, then since we have done some generic plant graphics, we know, Oh, I want to have a tree over here, I want to have a mass of shrubs over there. Okay, now we can start thinking about what tree or shrub that is going to be once this has been approved. But if you come in and do a plan and take all the time to select all the different plants right off the bat, and then show it to your client or your family, whoever you're presenting to, and they say, Well, that's okay, but we don't like the layout. We'd like to have the patio over here, we'd like to have this expanded. Then all that work that you put into selecting plants initially is going to be to a degree lost. It's better to do it conceptually and present your ideas and just run with it, and then we get more specific as we go. So I'm just going to show developing a conceptual plan very quickly, and because when I'm doing it, I'm just letting my thoughts run, keeping form composition and design approach in mind throughout the process. So let's just take a quick look at how I would develop a conceptual plan. So here's my site survey, and I got this by getting a floor plan from the client and here's the main level floor plan that was done by the architect. And even though it's not to scale, it is dimensioned. I know that's probably really difficult to see in this view, but it is dimensioned, so I could take those dimensions and then just transfer them to scale onto my drawing even though I was given a dimensioned plan, I want to make sure that that dimension plan was actually built per the design. So when I'm out in the field just doing a site survey, just kind of taking it in and assessing what the actual site conditions are, then I'm going to have an opportunity to pull a tape measure and make sure that everything lines up and is indeed accurate because you don't want to take a dimensioned plan and find out that for whatever reason, the builder, whoever did something and they expanded one wall a little bit, who knows? It's just a good idea always confirm that what you are given is correct. So anyway, that's what I did with this particular design, with this particular property. So I want to do a quick walk through. Course, here's the residence, and the thick black lines are the house walls. I do this with a 1.4 millimeter technical pin. You could have used or I could have used a fine point sharpie that would've been fine. Of course, these little blanks are my windows and the areas where you see the Xs across are covered areas. This is the car port and the driveway coming in or garage and driveway coming in. This is a patio off the side of the house, which in this instance is the south side of the house and then the front porch entry. I've got my doors indicated on this plan. You can see there's a little dashed line right here. Well, if this door could rotate 360 degrees, then in essence, the door itself would represent the radius of a circle and the hinges would be the center of that circle. I want to get the proper arc from my circle template and be able to use that to develop this arc right here. If this is the radius of a circle and this is eighth inch scale, and this doorway measures three feet wide, the radius would be three eighths of an inch, three feet eighth of an inch to the foot. The diameter would be six eighths, and that's what I want to work with. Six eighths is three quarters. If I set this right here, you can see that if the door could indeed go 360 degrees, that's what gives me this proper arc right at this location. It was the same over here, and it was a smaller arc because this was a narrower doorway right here. It was a little wood storage. So I just used a smaller diameter arc to create those. But that's a nice reference because it tells me which side the door is hinged on, where the arc is. So if I was designing a patio or some kind of entry at that door location, that wasn't there originally, then I would want to know which side the door is hinged on because that could have a play as far as the ergonomics of how I bring people into the house. So that's why I always make note of where the doors hinge and then show that little arc to where I can see the swing of the door. So that's what we've got going here. I do have a sliding glass door at this location. I've got a little double arrow right here to indicate the side that you would walk in and out of and then some rock walls that were existing stone stairs coming down, more rock walls that are existing. So that's the site plan that I have to work with. These trees over at this side were existing. So we've got all of this in place. And now let's take a look at some photographs of the property just to kind of give you a visual of what I was working with. And then I'm going to take some trace paper. I'm going to throw it on top of a site survey, and I'm going to start working up some ideas. So here is the house itself, and it's definitely got an architecture to it, kind of a rustic ranch house style. They live on 40 acres out in the country. They raise horses. So there's the front porch with that side porch off to the left. And this is the view looking from the front porch straight out to the east. That green area is part of their pasture, and that's their driveway swinging around. So what we want to do is frame this view and take advantage of that borrowed scenery off in the distance. Here's the side of the house, and this is the wood box where I had those double doors on the site plan, and it leads around to the garage. Finally, here we have the stone stairs going down, and these are all natural stone from the property, dry stacked into place. So this is going to play off of what we're going to want to do to keep the flavor going. Just one more view of some of the stone, and it's terraced, and we can see that on the site plan. And finally, a little bit of detail of the kind of elements that these folks really want to see. So there we have the project. We've got a cabin architecture that evokes the Old West, the clients. They have a 40 acre parcel. They have a vineyard. They raise horses, and they just want to be able to frame that view out to the east from the front of the house where they can sit on that front porch and enjoy the view. They want to have a lawn area, but they want to stay with the colors and the natural surroundings that they have bought into. So the goal is to come up with a conceptual plan and probably go through a couple of them, but come up with a plan that then can be evolved and finalized into an actual ink drawing for the clients that I would take to them and show them, Here's my ideas. Here's what I came up with. What do you think of it? And now, at that point, it's a topic of discussion and changes and modifications can be done with a minimum of input from me initially. I haven't gone to the planting plan stage. I just want to get the layout and walk them through what my ideas are. Okay, thanks. And let's have another break, and I'll see you in a bit. 23. Developing the Conceptual Plan Part Two: So we've had a chance to take a look at some photographs of the site. So now I'm going to start developing the conceptual plan. And when I'm doing this, I typically for my purposes, I'll start with a rectangular design approach. I'm comfortable working with that, and I can expand off of that as I develop subsequent plan solutions. And so that's how I would get started. One thing I can suggest is once you start drawing, I have trace paper over my site plan. Once I start drawing, I'm going to be trying to keep that grease stick on my trace paper as much as possible. I don't want to draw a little bit, pick it up, stare at it, start drawing again, pick it up and stare at it. I don't want to go into that kind of an analysis. I want to work more on a I guess I'll say a gut feel. And the more I can keep that pencil on the trace paper and just draw shapes, I will naturally tend to flow into good solid form composition. And then once I finish that, I can throw in some rough plant graphics. I want some shrubs here, some trees there. Great. I'm done with that. I can look at it, rip that piece of traced paper off, put a fresh sheet on, and then develop a second conceptual plan and maybe refine what I've done or go in a slightly different direction. I won't know until I get there. So that's how I work on developing a conceptual plan for any kind of a project that I'm working on. So let's just take a look at how I would work this up. And right over in here is where that power box was that we could see in one of the photographs. I know I need to have access into the porch from the driveway area, so I'm just going to start drawing up. I want to have some access areas and then I'm going to come down and put down just shapes. I don't know where I'm going with this at this particular moment, but I'm going to just throw down some shapes. I know they want to have some access coming into the wood box off of the driveway and I've got access there. I want to frame this view out here. Well, I think since there's land falling out, I'm going to start thinking about maybe a retaining wall. I'm going to do that. I'm going to come in and I am going to throw a couple of trees to where I can see between them out to that view, but I'm going to build this up maybe because I'm always a fan of arbors, I could do an arbor idea to where I've got that access. Now maybe this becomes a set of stairs coming down. That leaves that open, but I could do some plantings in here. I think that bringing this up, getting these arbors going, I think I can skip that power box is more over to this side if I remember right. This is going to be lawn in here. I'm going to have some focal points. I'm going to just do some shrubs coming out, some shrubs coming over. I think I'll bring the lawn all the way over into here, here's that side porch. I'm going to make this an herb bed. Now we've got some plantings in here, maybe some trees to shade the entry coming in and just frame this and soften this side down. I'm not going to worry about that. I am going to expand and put an arbor. This is the kitchen window right here. So I'm going to put an arbor coming out that could have some vines on it to help just soften this, and that can just be graveled or decomposed, granted underneath there, just so that they've got some access around to the garage. Okay, so there's concept plan number one. Is it any good? It's okay. But, you know, that's the whole idea is you're not going to know until you get started, and you're probably not going to come up with the solution that you're going to be really happy with on the very first try, especially when you're first starting out doing landscape design, garden design. So now I'm going to go ahead and in the next lesson, we're going to rip this sheet of paper off, and I'm going to start another concept plan and just kind of refine and work up ideas based on the one that I've just done. So let's take a short break, and I'll see you in a bit. I 24. Developing the Conceptual Plan Part Three: Okay, so we've done concept plan number one, but I want to refine this. So I'm going to move ahead, and we're going to take this sheet off the paper, this trace paper off. And let's work up another idea, but kind of expand on the general concept of where I started. So I'm just going to take this one off. There's some ideas to it, and I'll set it off to the side. Pull another sheet of trace paper, set it down here. And I'm going to adjust my camera again just a little bit. So now I know I like this rectangular idea, but I'm going to keep my walkway coming in off of this. I'm also going to keep a walkway coming in to the wood box. But I think I want to make sure that you can go either direction if necessary. I'm going to put some plantings, there. I like my tree idea there with some shrubs underneath it. Now I'm just going to go ahead and push this out. Since this curves around a little bit, I'm going to throw some 45 into this. And bring this back up. I want to have access across here because I realized that there isn't any, so I'm just going to throw an idea like that in. That gives me a place for a plant in there. I still like the idea of having some kind of a retaining wall swinging around at some point, framing this with a couple of large trees and I'm going to go ahead. With this idea with the arbor, where I can get some plants growing on that, now I think that in hindsight, because they may not have enough stone, and I don't think they do. So I'm just going to throw a split rail fence down to where this little bit of stone wall can be. That will give that sense of enclosure, and then the split rail fence is going to fit in with that kind of rustic Old West style of the home. And this can still be lawn and this can be flowers and shrubs and the same thing over here. And I think I'm going to do and I'm going to put stairway coming down here and stairway coming down here from under the arbor so that I can leave this a little bit taller. And have some plantings in here. Here's those existing plants. This is still good. I still like the idea of the arbor over here. I still like the idea of the herb beds right in here. So I'm going to stick with that. So I'm refining my idea a little bit. And now I'm going to throw that away, spit this down and I'm going to again, I know I want to keep this access here, and I know I want to keep access to the wood box so they can pull up with a tractor or whatever and load that and then have access back and forth. This area, I'm set with that, I'm happy with that idea on this I like that idea of the 45 degree coming around, and then I think I'm just going to stick with this, but I'm going to throw a 45 in here. Keep some plantings, keep this as lawn. I did like the idea of the arbor but I think I'm going to expand this idea over and pick up the flavor of the front porch and put some stone out here where you could actually have a bench seat underneath the arbor, in case you wanted to be out at this location, you could even have the bench seats turned to where you could look out in this location. I'm going to think about where I have stairs. I don't think I'd want to come all the way out to walk down to get to the barns. I'm going to come over, and I'm going to create an access point coming down with stone steps at this location to get down the hill and then a path that'll lead on down to the barn. At that point, I'm going to go ahead and stick below stone wall swing around. And then the split rail fence idea coming along here, shrubs and flowers around here, maybe something a little taller to help punctuate and keep this view open and then go ahead and stick with my idea of the trees, and I'll center all of this a little bit better off of the front where they can look out this window or this window and see what they're looking at. Okay, so that's it. That was my second concept plan, and I'm happy with this. I think I've got some good, strong bones to this design solution. So this is the one I'm going to go ahead and finalize. And that's where I can take this. And the next lesson, we're going to go ahead and get a polished, more finalized design solution concept plan inked up, and it would be something that I would be able to show to a client. And it's literally moving that fast. I'm just getting these shapes down and working them up, and it becomes an intuitive feel if it's going to work for you or not and for your client, as well. But this is how I think is a good, strong way to get going on this. So let's go ahead and finalize this concept plan and make it actually look like something. 25. The Final Concept Plan: So in the last lesson, I came up with what I'm going to develop into my final concept plan. So at this point, I have taken the free hand drawing, and I've gone ahead and used my parallel edge, by drafting triangle, all of this, to be able to actually draft up and develop a plan that is to scale for the client's presentation. I've put together plant graphics. I'm going to have all of that. So now I'm going to ink the plan because by inking it, it's going to give it a much bolder appearance, and it's going to preserve it. It's going to be permanent. So let's walk our way through this and we'll just get this final concept plan drafted up. M So there's my final conceptual plan. But the whole thing is, this is a discussion document. I can now take something that I feel comfortable with, take it to my client, my friends, whoever I'm presenting to. And I can say, Here's what I've come up with. Here's why I have trees located at these locations to help frame the view. This is why I have plantings of various heights at these different locations to help control traffic, to frame views again, to add interest, color, fragrance, whatever it might be. Have arbors down here to create shade and once again, reinforce how I want people to view the garden. This is a discussion document. If they come back and say, It's great. We like all of this, but what trees have you picked out? I don't know. I just know I have a rough idea of the size and mass of the tree. Now when I go to select the actual species, I have narrowed this down a long ways instead of a giant plant palate to choose from. I know I want to have a tree that's this diameter, this tall, these ideas. I've refined this down without being specific. Same idea with any kind of perennials or herbaceous borders, the same idea with any taller shrubs, even what kind of vines I may have on arbors if I go that way. It's a conceptual document, a conceptual plan that you can take and say, Here's where I want to go. Now you get feedback. Now you can make changes with a minimum of effort to get honed in and polished and then come back and do an actual planting plan. Now, we're not doing that in this course, but we are going to go through the basics of planting design and how plants reinforce what our design solutions should be. So, Okay, that's it for now. And so one more break here, and I'll see you in a bit. 26. Coloring the Concept Plan: Okay, we've inked in our final concept plan, and we're ready to show it to the client, right? Well, not really. Because to make this really pop and get your clients involved, the best thing you can do is color in your plan. Now, I've drawn this on a 24 36 inch sheet of paper. That's a pretty big sheet of paper. You don't want to color in a sheet that size. It takes too long. You're going to use a lot of material to do that. What you want to do is you're going to take this 24 by 36 inch sheet of paper. You're going to go to your local copy shop or print center, and you're going to have it reduced down to an 11 by 17, which, in metric would be what? The equivalent of an A four or A three. So but you want to reduce it down, now you've got something that's a lot faster to color. And if you're going to do trade shows, any kind of marketing, you've got something that you can put up on a display board to show people what you're capable of doing. So right now, here is one of my students hand drawings of one of her designs, and it was done on copy paper at 11 by 17, which is just plain bond paper. But then once that's colored, you can take it down and have the copy shop do it on glossy card stock. So if you look at this, you'll probably see there's a little bit of sheen to it. That sheen that glossiness helps to pop these colors off of the paper much more effectively. So we're going to work in that direction. And when I'm working, I'm just using I'm using prisma color, and this is a 60 pencil set. I don't use quarter of those, so you don't need a set this large, and really any colored pencil will do just fine. And then I also use soft chalk pastels, and I use those for the larger areas, and I'll demonstrate that here in a moment. So again, I'm just using a small selection of the colors out of my colored pencils and of the colored pastels, the chalk pastels, as well. So I'm not using a huge selection. I'm narrowing this down, and I'm layering colors together to get different effects. So out of the prismic colors, the ones that I use the most often are going to be a various assortment of greens, and that just kind of it's whatever I see fit to, greens are important, and then I'm going to be using poppy red, an orange, a purple, a true blue, and finally a canary yellow, a nice clean, bright yellow. Now, when I'm coloring, I don't want to have a real sharp point on my pencil. That's going to leave too much of a real strong line to it. I want it to be softer. So what I want to do is I want to chisel the point down to where I have a broader flat surface when I'm actually doing my color rendering. When I want to color, I want to have, again, kind of a chisel point. So I'm going to take my pencil and I'm literally just going to fairly hard color that until I get a blunt broad point to this. Then when I start to color, all of my coloring is done as a downward stroke of my pencil. I'm not taking it and keeping the lead on and just going back and forth. I'm literally stroke, lift, stroke, lift, and I do that quickly. That gives me a nice soft look to this. I'll also use pastels and my pastels, soft chalk pastels, I'll use cotton and tips to help blending it together. Then I can take this. Using my eraser shield, I can just come in and literally over an area that I may want to use this, scrape a little off, and then I can come in and use a cotton swab and get a nice soft blended color out of this. So that's the technique I use when I start to render a plan. So we're going to take a look at this final concept plan that I put together, and we're going to render this out, and I'll show you how this all works and how you can get some depth into your drawing into your rendering just by the colors that you're using and the way we blend these together. So let's just take a look at that. So I can look at this plan right here, and let's start with these two trees. I know these trees are going to be dominant over this lawn or turf area. And I could use my colored pencils and say, a green to color this in. But I can also come in with my pastel, my soft chalk pastel, and this is why I like using these because I can scrape a little bit of green onto the paper. And then using my cotton ball, I can just throw that little bit of color on there very quickly and easily. I can come in and use a little bit of red because a little bit of red just helps give it a little more depth and I can use my tip, and then I can come in with, say, a yellow and I'll use yellow as a backdrop color very often, even in areas where I know I'm going to be having green. I've got my lawn area down here, and I'm just going to throw some color onto that, and now I can come back with, say, maybe a slightly darker green, and you just want to get your idea across to your client. And you'll always have a little bit of color residual on your cotton. So even if you haven't scraped any, you can get a real quick effect with that. Then I can come in and I'm going to start looking at some of my different plantings, and I've already chiseled the point on my canary yellow. I'm just going to come in and throw some color onto these small trees, shrubs right there. Now I'm going to come in and I'm going to layer a little bit of blue to that. Then I can come in and even layer a little more green into it. And finally, I can come in with a little bit of red to give a little bit of what we would call a glow to the drawing. And that all helps to start giving it just a little bit more interest to what this is going to be. And since I am using pastel, pastel can potentially get on the heel of your hand. So if you just take a clean sheet of copy paper, you can lay that over and then you're protecting your drawing from your hand and potentially smearing. I'm always going to try to concentrate a little bit of the darker colors on what I would consider to be the shady side of the drawing. I just continue in this mode until I'm done. So really, that's how quickly you can get color down onto an 11 by 17 plan reduction and get some layering to it, get some interest to it, take it down, get it put onto the glossy card stock if your printer will do that for you and help pop those colors. And now you've got something that you can take to your client and you can really kind of walk them through much more effectively by putting this color to your plan. Okay, that's coloring. And so in the next lesson, we're going to take a look at some basics of planting design, and we're gonna be close to wrapping this up. Okay, let's take a break, and I'll see you in a bit. 27. The Principles of Planting Design: And So what's the process for developing a planting design? Well, it still comes back to our conceptual plan, that initial plan that we want to take to the client. And just like in this example here that I've shown before, and I've got a couple of others we're going to look at, what we're doing is we're not just putting plants, masses, trees on the paper, willy nilly. That is not the point of this. The point of it is to use plants to reinforce our design solution. So for example, if I have a walkway or a stairway and I want to reinforce movement along that walkway, then I may go ahead and put some hedging on each side. The hedges kind of box that walkway or stairway in. It reinforces movement. If I have brick paving, then I'm going to put that brick paving pattern down as a running bond or maybe as a herring bone pattern. These are dynamic patterns that tend to pull you along. So it reinforces the fact that we have hedging. Now, at this stage, I may have an idea of what the landscape is on each side of the hedge, and I want to determine that this hedge is going to be, I'm just going to say two to three feet high and about two feet wide. Now I take my plan to the client and I'm showing them the overall concept plan again, and they love everything about it. It's a slam dunk. Great. I come back to the office. And now, when I go to look at that hedging material, because I've determined and explained it to the client or whoever I'm presenting to that it's going to be two to three feet high and about two feet wide. Well, that throws out a whole bunch of different plants that wouldn't fit that criteria. I've narrowed the field down to where I can start looking at, whether it be boxwood or wanimus or if they don't want something very formal, I could go with azaleas, something that might be a little looser in free form. But I'm looking at plants that are going to fit that growth criteria. Now, I could reinforce that same movement by having, say, birch trees on the outside of the hedge, but a repetition of birch going down that pathway or going up the stairway. So now you don't only have the movement of the hedge to help move you along that walkway. Now you've got the repetition and the vertical element of the trees, the tree trunks going along. So everything that I'm doing, what I'm creating a conceptual planting plan is in the back of my mind, why is this plant here? Why do I have a grass, an ornamental grass at this location? Well, maybe it's to catch the view and pull people down, punctuate a certain location within the garden. So that's how I start to develop. And then when it comes to actually doing a working drawing, an actual planting plan, I can go back to my notes or whatever I remember and say, This is what I wanted to have at this location. I wanted to be this size, I wanted this flower color. I wanted this idea. I wanted an evergreen tree. I wanted a deciduous tree. I wanted them at this diameter or this height. And without being specific at the conceptual stage, I am being somewhat specific in the purpose of the planting and the size of the planting. So let's just take a quick look at one of these concept plans that I've put together and kind of walk our way through that. So here's a conceptual planting plan, and I've just got some trees up here, and I've got a couple of smaller trees or tall bushes at the entry where the walkway comes in. I've got a tree here at this corner. I've got some little spiky guys because I wanted to do something that would punctuate the location. So you see, even in this plan, I'm not being specific, but I do have a purpose for why I have the plant masses or the trees at these locations. The purpose of this would be for screening in this particular situation. The purpose of these is for some shade and a little bit of parcel screening. It's not as important as this location. I wanted to have some perennial color coming around here. I wanted to do something to accent the entry coming in. Same idea here at the entry to the home and such like that. So it's all conceptual. It's all just an idea. And if the client or whoever I'm presenting to says, Well, gosh, what are these trees? I'm going to say, I don't know. I don't know what they are yet. I just want to know if you like the layout. And it's okay if you don't know. And it's okay if you do. It's like, I want these to be Japanese maples. I want these to be whatever. That's fine. You don't need to know exactly what each species or each plant is going to be at the conceptual stage. Here's a conceptual planting plan. I know we've looked at this particular plan before in other lectures, but look what a difference throwing some color onto this makes. Even this little plan here throwing a little bit of color onto it helps it to pop off the paper. So you see the color really does help bring it up off the paper, and it helps to reinforce your design solution, and it helps to convey that solution to the person, whoever you're presenting this to. I keep saying client that's kind of in the back of my mind. So how do I generate? How do I actually do a lot of these plant graphics? That's what we're going to take a look at next so that you can get an idea of how I actually produce these. 28. Planting Graphics: So if I look at this blank sheet of paper that I've got right here and a quick look at this, I've got my different trees. I've got some screening shrubs with a bold line indicating that it's coming up off the paper to a greater degree. I've got some smaller plantings in here to punctuate the entry. I've got some specimen plants in these corners here. So how do you generate this kind of graphic? Well, for trees, you're going to be working with their general diameter at the scale you're working with. So our goal with planting graphics is to try to turn a two dimensional sheet of paper, just a flat sheet of paper with drawing on it into more of a three dimensional effect. And we do that with line weight. The thicker the line weight, the more it's going to come up off the paper closer to the viewer. The finer the line weight, the thinner the line, the more it's going to recede away from and we reinforce that with color because the darker the color, the more it's going to pop up off the page, and the lighter the color, the more it's going to recede away. So if we look at this little design here, the darker colors represent the trees, and these trees come up off the page to a greater degree. And the lighter colors, the paving and such, recede away from you. So we're going to use a series of plant graphics and how you can draw to get this effect. And then when you come back in and do your color rendering, then it just reinforces that whole procedure that we're trying to do. Remember, trying to get a three D effect off of a two D two dimensional sheet of paper. So let's just take a look and see how I do these simple plant graphics to get this effect. So I'm going to take a circle template that's appropriate for the size of the plant that I want to draw in. And in the case of these trees right here, to create this graphic, I'm simply taking my sharpie fine point pen, and I'm going to create a series of dots around the outside, and I'm just bouncing straight up and down. And then I'm going to pick one side or the other, top or bottom, but I'm going to create a shadowing effect. So at the conceptual stage, you still want to keep the ergonomics of your planting ideas in mind. You don't want to have this massive tree that you know is going to be way too big in a small area. So you're going to be looking at the diameter of circle templates of your drawing and you're going to keep this ergonomically correct to where you can explain it and justify your design solution to a greater degree. Then I can put that and maybe a couple on the interior. Now I've got a nice shadowing effect to what my plan looks like, and I can double this up and have them overlapping each other if I choose to. Now if I want to have some plantings underneath that, I can come in, and in this case, I'm using 0.35 micron. And because I don't really know what these individual plants may be, I'm just going to do kind of what I call a cloud drawing, kind of like when you drew clouds. I'm just going to put that in because I can just label that planting. At this point, it doesn't really matter. I just know I have a purpose for it and I want to have some plants at this location in the plan. Then if I want to have some hedging, I'm going to bring in triangle or use my straight edge just to give myself some dimensions of the thickness or the width and length of my proposed hedgerow. And then using a 0.5 millimeter micron, I'm just going to follow this edging all the way around and put just some irregular lines to it, and then I can come in with a finer point and create a little bit of texture within this. And then if I want to have a specimen plant, say ornamental grass or a series of them, I can come in. And again, probably using a 0.2, maybe 0.35 millimeter. I'm just going to pick a circle template, a circle diameter. And I'm going to literally just bouncing back and forth on the inside of this diameter. I would just go back and forth a few times. And now I've created some specimen plants, some iris or ornamental grasses in front of a hedgerow underneath a tree with some other shrubs, and I can put a third tree at the end of my hedgerow, again, selecting a diameter, throwing that out. Now I'm going to come in and use my sharpie, and rather than using this dot effect, I'm going to And I try to keep the sharpie as vertical as possible because it helps to keep me from smearing too much. And I establish an initial boundary or border or circumference to it, and then I can just come back. And throw some extra continual lines through this. Now I've got that effect happening. And then finally, let's say I wanted to have a conifer of some kind backing up this hedgerow, then I'm going to come in and I'm using my 0.5 micron or technical pen if you're using those. And again, just like in the earlier graphics, I'm simply bouncing back and forth. But now I'm going to come in and use the 0.5 and then the 0.35, and that gives me that nice little graphic right there. So in a nutshell, I can come in and I can even throw a little bit of what could potentially be ground covers. There in front of these plantings. So doing your conceptual planting plan can actually go pretty darn quick. And remember, you're keeping in mind the purpose of the plant and the overall size of the plant because even though it's conceptual, you still want to have the ergonomics working properly. And remember that the heavier the line, the thicker the line, the darker the line, the more it's going to pop up off the paper, and the thinner the line or finer the line, the more it's going to recede visually away from you. And then when you come back in, you put bolder colors, darker greens on those trees, the ones with the darker lines, that's going to pull it off the paper even more, and then lighter colors down below that. So it's all just a matter of layering your plan together, layering your graphics, and then reinforcing it with the coloring techniques that we were looking at in the previous lecture. So that's planting graphics and planting design elements of it, the principles of planting design kind of in a nutshell. So okay, that's it for here. Let's take a break, and I'll see you in the next one. 29. Course Wrap up: Okay, so that pretty well wraps up our course on the fundamentals of garden design. And everything that we've covered is going to give you a good solid foundation if you choose to do landscape design for yourself or anyone else. And if you want to have some more information or reference, then I have my book, the fundamentals of Garden Design, and this is what I actually wrote in order to develop this course. So I want to thank you and I encourage you to leave a review and certainly do a design, do a project, and upload it where we can all have an opportunity to view your work. Okay, so keep an eye open for more gardening courses coming along, and thanks again, and I'll see you on down the line.