In the language of landscaping, you want to achieve unity, use the appropriate proportions and a correct sense of scale, and balance color, texture, and form. Landscaping lingo may sound like mumbo-jumbo at first, but if you can dress yourself in the morning, you can understand the rules that help change your yard into something more satisfying.

Unify With Unity

Unity is what keeps all the separate parts of your landscape tied together, so that the eyes and feet flow from one part of the yard to another. To achieve unity in your landscape, do the following:

• Clearly define pathways.
• Link greenery. Two shade trees and a forsythia bush stuck in your lawn do not create a unified landscape design. Plant ground cover at the feet of all three to visually link them together, continue the same ground cover along the fence and around the corner to the patio, stick a couple more forsythias at the corner, and presto! — unity.
• Have a style. Know what you want your garden to say about you:
  • If your tastes run to formal precision, for instance, you probably want clipped hedges, classic statues, brick or stone pathways, and symmetrical plantings that provide calming mirror images.
  • A cottage garden jumble of exuberant flowers with rustic fences, bent-twig benches, and a concrete frog along the path tells visitors that you’re more of a free-spirit type.
  • Avoid the “collector garden,” where you have just one of each kind of plant that catches your eye. Build a sense of rhythm by planting multiples of the same plant. The exception to this guideline is if the single plant is the focal point of your garden, such as a beautifully shaped Japanese maple in the center of your yard.
  
  Combining the two styles looks disjointed and has a disquieting effect on your landscape. But you can still have your formal rose garden and your wildflower meadow without sacrificing unity. Just don’t put them side-by-side: separate them by a hedge, put them on opposite sides of the house, or link them by a transition zone that gradually makes the shift from control to wilderness.
• Repeat color. Repeating colors throughout the landscape makes it look like it’s all one piece. Place clumps of yellow flowers in various beds, pots, or plantings across your back yard, and your eye will travel from one patch of yellow to the next in a seamless, satisfying way. You can combine plant colors with house or hardscape colors, too. For example, a cobalt blue lattice matched with big, blue-and-yellow flower pots gives you a two-tone color scheme to run throughout the garden.

Repeat After Me

Repetition of hardscape materials — including brick, wood, stone, concrete, wood chips, and fencing — is a simple way to make your garden look like it’s all one piece, even if the areas are distinctly different.

Manmade materials — basically, anything other than plants — carry great weight in the landscape, because they draw viewers’ eyes like a magnet. Select your hardscape materials to match your garden style and repeat them throughout the landscape. For example, you can use a single section of diagonal, framed lattice to support a climbing rose along the wall of your house; an L-shaped couple of sections to shield the compost pile from view; or three or four linked sections to serve as a privacy screen along the patio, as shown in the image below. Depending how large your yard is, you may want to repeat the lattice theme in variation by installing solid, vertical-board privacy fence topped by a narrow strip of lattice.

Placing the same plants here and there is an easy trick. Simply repeat backbone plants that perform well most of the year, such as evergreens, ground covers, and shrubs to tie your garden areas to each other. Repeating shapes helps pull things together, too: curved outlines of beds, undulating paths, bosomy urns, and mounds of plants. Or, try no-nonsense point-A-to-point-B paths, yardstick-straight bed edges, spiky plant forms, clipped hedges, or vertical board fences.  ....read more