Planting Design: The Second StepIT MUST BE EVIDENT to the readers who have reached this point in this site that little is going to be said about plants. We have discussed basic design and construction at considerable length, and in some cases in great detail, but we have deliberately avoided the subject of planting except in a general way as applied to the flower garden. This may seem peculiar to many readers, for there exists a large group of country and suburban homeowners who think, mistakenly we believe, that landscape architecture begins and ends with planting. We feel, first, that' the planting must always evolve from the basic design, and, second, that planting design is a big enough subject to have a book of its own. That book is already in preparation and will be published as a companion to this one. In the meantime, however, a brief review (or perhaps we should say preview) of the basic principles and rules of planting design may be found useful. Composition is a word frequently heard in any discussion on art. It means simply the orderly arrangement of the parts of a picture into a pleasing whole. Plant compositions, then, must be orderly and pleasing. Pleasure follows logically from order because the cultivated human mind reacts favorably to order and unfavorably to confusion. Various rules and principles have been
evolved for the making of successful compositions.
Ideas such as segregation, balance, repetition,
sequence, variety, rhythm, and accent are
employed to make a composition effective.
If a single plant or group of plants in
a composition are to accomplish any artistic
purpose they must be chosen with these
ideas in mind. Too often people go to the
nursery and bring home a lot of plants
that have interested them as individuals, and
then try to find suitable places for them. This
method will never produce artistic results. You
may get some interesting specimens and, occasionally,
some pictorially effective compositions
(by accident), but you will rarely get
the most effective landscape setting possible under the circumstances. back
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