Why your GARDEN DESIGN needs LINES

Good lines mean good garden designs.

Strong lines in planting design and garden design can draw your eye into the landscape, determining both where people look and where they go. Curved lines shape informal garden beds and add intrigue to pathways. Straight lines evoke a sense of order and a more formal crispness. Horizontal lines create a sense of equilibrium and peacefulness.

Here we explore the impact having strong lines can have within a garden design and highlight plants that can do a lot of the heavy lifting for you.

Plants List:

Berberis thunbergii ‘Helmond Pillar’ / Barberry
Berberis thunbergii ‘Orange Rocket’ / Barberry
Berberis thunbergii ‘Red Rocket’ / Barberry
Betulus carpinus ‘Columnaris Nana’ / Hornbeam
Calamagrostis x acutiflora ‘Karl Foerster’
Cornus contraversa / Wedding Cake Tree
Cupressus sempervirens/ Italian Cypress
Digitalis ferruginea / Rusty Foxglove
Digitalis purpurea / Foxglove
Fagas sylvatica ‘Dawyck’ / Beech
Ilex crenata ‘Sky Pencil’
Sambucus nigra ‘Black Tower’ / Elder
Sambucus nigra ‘Eif’fel Tower / Elder
Sambucus nigra ‘Golden Tower’ / Elder
Taxus baccata ‘Fastigiata Robusta’ / Irish Yew

Hey plant fans Sonia here and today I want to speak to you about why your garden design needs lines there are lines in your garden anywhere through default such as fences driveways and so on but actually if you become intentional about your lines that’s when you can really start to see a difference

In the impact that your garden has so why are lines so important well they direct the eye as to where we look but they also direct as to where we travel as well and physically move they influence how we see and interpret and relate to the and they provide structure

And structure is often what makes the difference between an impactful garden and an unremarkable Garden they also create drama the vertical ones anyway and the horizontal ones are really very good at providing stability and a sense of dare I say it Serenity if you think about where the ocean meets The Horizon

Is that not Serene so basically the cruxer is the lines organize the space so we have two types of lines curved and straight curved lines can be intentional if you think about a path you might put a curved path in to create some Intrigue some curiosity also to maybe to deformalization

And Cyprus here we’ve got three superb columns very very striking and I would suggest that the eye goes straight there so lines in your garden don’t need to be limited to hard Landscaping it is perfectly possible and indeed I would encourage you to create lines through

Your planting as well and that’s what I want to go into a little bit more in depth with in this video so first then plants with strong vertical lines if you look here these are a couple of photos I took at hunting Brook which is Jimmy Blake’s Garden in Ireland earlier this

Year we’ve got some really lovely blue delphiniums here on the left and then we have a little row of Silver Birch on the right and you can’t see it but actually behind there is Open Fields very pretty view it’s slightly on a hill not from this vantage point but from certain

Vantage points in the garden you’re getting a real vea just added a bit there to highlight the vertical lines on that second example here we have golden bamboo which we have at pop in Brixton in London what’s interesting about pop Brixton is it’s like a series of popup

Shops and bars they are made out of shipping containers so it’s got a very industrial Vibe but they’ve really added quite a bit of planting just some cool vibrant planting I do think this is really cool the golden bamboo going you see it go up it’s a little bit screening

But I feel like it’s a bit more than that you know they’re adding a bit of jazz in there it’s not just the color it’s it’s the structure as well it’s the height it’s the drama plants that may interest you then with strong vertical structure grasses we’ve got camrus ex

Acut Flora Carl Forester even though it’s a grass it’s quite often used as a boundary because it’s it’s so very vertical we’ve got flower spikes any of the fox gloves actually digitales Pera or my favorite digital is verini superb for this verticality but actually any of

The flowers spikes really there is a lot of them so go explore shrubs then we have burus tberg got red rocket orange rocket helman’s pillar I love these ones as well there’s a few sambas that you can get not every single cultivar but some of the cultivar well you can tell

By their names because sambuka nagra Black Tower there’s sambuka golden Tower and there’s also sambuka Eiffel Tower as you can imagine they are narrow and straight so trees then fasted J trees if you know what fasted J means we already mentioned Italian Cyprus caprus seirin so when my daughter was three I remember

We were in the street she was pointing and saying oh look at the arrow in the sky look at the arrow in the sky I couldn’t work out what she meant I finally realized that she was pointing at the church spire and she had interpreted the church Spire as an arrow

Pointing up to the sky which perhaps what the original architect was also thinking of in terms of pointing up to heaven and you know whoever might be there check your zones because they’re not reliably Hardy if you wanted a a Rel reliably Hardy alternative you could go

For taxes Pata and Alex konata Sky Pencil which is a holly carpinus betulus columnus Nana Nana is dwarf in Latin so whenever you see Nana it’s going to be a smaller version than what you might otherwise come up against that’s a horn beam the other one you see quite often

Is figus silvatica daek and that’s a really really rich red purple Beach so plants with horizontal lines then we have got ver burum Plum Japanese snowball bush and you can see look at the horizontal lines there very strong we showing you some Cloud pruning here

At the Mana house in Aya St Lawrence you can see the horizontal lines there but in fact any Cloud pruned TPU rzed thing will work a treat that’s Halo heang National Park in South Korea and that’s magnificent version of the horizontal layering obviously that’s taken to an

Extreme although it is a sight to behold keep keep that in mind while you’re dreaming up your garden okay so just for fun then we’ve got a few plants that have both strong vertical and horizontal lines on them so we have here neoria red hot porkers again we’re back to the

Flower spikes but you can see there we’ve got the strong stalk and then we’ve got horizontal line as well here we’ve got miscan census zeban also known as zebra grass I took this at cap Mana in Enfield when I was at College there it’s very tall it’s roughly about 2 m

And it has a nice fct horizontal line going across it as well just to show you then a garden with strong vertical and horizontal lines and the difference that it makes this is again this is the manor at iot St Lawrence in hartfordshire here we’ve got a Corners controversa which is

Called the Wedding Cake Tree now you can see why because look at the tears that the branches are forming I think this looks awesome perhaps we’re not sure why but then if you look at how strong the linage is in that that goes somewhere to explaining why this works so very well

There’s other things going on as well like the contrast of the light the very light foliage of the weding Cake Tree against the very dark foliage of probably you the Hedge at the back same Garden from a different angle I mean even look at those stripes in the lawn

In terms of the lines and you can just see how impactful the garden becomes When lines are thought out and are intentional so I hope this has given you a few things to think about now that you understand that lines organize the space and also that you can achieve lines

Through your selection of plants also that you can invoke certain feelings according to how you design your lines we talked about the horizontal lines bringing sense of stability the vertical lines are sometimes quite austere you know they bring an air of formality Please Subscribe if you found this

Useful and I will continue to bring you plants focused solutions for your garden if you feel like you want to dive deeper into designing with plants then you can watch this video here which is an exploration of leaf types and how you can maximize their value in the garden

To help you build an engaging border over and out see you in the next one