How to design a garden

Everywhere you go, garden designers seem to be offering slightly differing advice about this, but if you focus on the seven key principles of garden design, it will help guide you in the direction of fulfilling your aspirations for your garden.

Tom Angel is based in Glasgow, Scotland, and works as a garden designer and landscape gardener. He is both a chartered horticulturist as well as a fully-qualified and award-winning garden designer.

The key principles of garden design are unity, repetition, harmony, balance, scale/proportion, rhythm/movement and colour. The list is never quite the same in the different garden design textbooks and websites but everyone’s talking about roughly the same things. There are different ways of looking at and approaching the different aspects of garden design, but the below will hopefully give you a bit of food for thought. Garden designers in Glasgow and everywhere else all look to these principles when thinking about new garden designs.

Unity is about making sure the garden looks like it is part of one overall scheme. You can manage this by choosing materials that tie in with the house design/construction, as well as including the same plants and construction materials threading through your garden as far as is possible.

Repetition ties in with unity, but may also be about repeating the same shapes through you garden, be that in the growth habit of plants, or the geometric layout of the paths and flowerbeds in your garden design.

Harmony is the third principle of garden design, but bear in mind that you may be looking to include contrasting features as well. Think of the traditional cottage garden, with lots of contrasting colours and sometimes disobeying every rule in the book with regards to colour combinations. A more harmonious look is created by reducing the breadth of the colour palette. 

Balance refers to the different ‘masses’ within your garden, be they large trees or bushes, or sheds or greenhouses. Remember it is possible to balance out a shed with a tree potentially, and vice versa.

Scale/proportion is about using the right size plants and structures within your garden design. We’ve all seen gardens with trees that are way too big for the space, so remember to look at the ultimate size your new plants will grow to and be guided by that when drawing up the planting plan for your garden design.

Rhythm, movement and texture is created by the different shapes I think the garden - be they straight or curved paths - or the different textures of plants - swaying grasses or winter seed heads. The size of, for example, paving materials within a garden design can dictate the speed that people travel through the garden, be that when they are walking through it or looking across it.

Colour is critical to the feel of a garden, and whilst this is another garden design principle that you can play with a bit, obeying the principles of working with a colour wheel will help you create a ‘hot’ lively-feeling garden or a ‘cooler’ meditative-feeling garden, or something in between.

There are a number of other tricks that garden designers employ, such as obscuring sight lines and ensuring vertical surfaces are not more than a third the height of the horizontal surface (and many many more!), but by looking at your garden whilst thinking about these garden design principles you will hopefully start seeing its potential.

Tom designs gardens and creates planting plans in Glasgow, Scotland, and provides an online planting plan service all over the UK. He is a chartered horticulturist and also won a Silver Gilt Award and Best New Show Garden at Gardening Scotland in 2019.