Frame a Garden View for Intrigue and Abundance
Superior photographers learn how to harvest the extraneous details from the outside edges of a photo to improve its quality. Similarly, you can improve the general image of your backyard when you impose a frame around its views.
The classic elements of style, such as line, form, texture and color, are useful tools when composing and editing the desired scene. Try for simplicity, because an uncomplicated selection of crops, a cohesive bloom and foliage palette, and constructions that are relevant to your house’s architecture are key.
The frame through which you observe and enjoy near and distant views may have vertical parts — characterized by doorways, tall plants or an opening in a fence. Arches and arbors overhead or pathways and stepping stones under form the horizontal plane. Consider each as a significant piece of that general image because you direct the viewer’s eye toward specific scenes.
A gratifying view offers an area of the landscape to be seen — it commands attention when framed by decorative trees, arbors or trellises. A gratifying vista is usually savored from a distance, letting you borrow character’s beauty as a backdrop for your own garden.
Listed below are a few of my favourite pictures that catch the spirit of this idea. Your backyard will feel magnanimous once you open it up to normal or cultivated landscapes.
ROOMS & BLOOMS
Portals, admissions and transitions. Whenever there’s no remote or territorial view to love, you can conjure an interior view. Garden designers use visual techniques to draw and direct the eye — and you’re able to adopt a similar strategy in your own backyard. Here, a full-scale doorway was inserted right into a fence. When open, it reveals a beautiful scene inside.
With thoughtful preparation and positioning of crops, the designer has created a spectacular visual treat that invites further exploration. The fence and door may be entirely functional, however they define and frame how one observes the garden.
Outside Landscape Group
Emphasize character. Peer through this vine-clad arbor and observe layer upon layer of shape, form, texture and color. Each plant is highlighted in sharp relief due to the way sunlight dances across its own form.
If you plan an island bed, then lay a perennial border or place a specimen tree, think about the method by which the sun rises or sets in your own landscape. Backlighting — character’s wonderful gift of illumination — can thoroughly change the disposition of a backyard view. Similarly, the light at dusk or dawn may magnify the seriousness of a vignette, which makes it more alluring in that special moment once the daylight changes.
Sutton Suzuki Architects
Open up views. Thoughtful pruning or editing may make room for a gorgeous distant scene. Rather than cutting down a large tree that may be obstructing your view, invest in the experience of a certified arborist who can open up view zones with targeted branch elimination, letting you enjoy both the tree and the view beyond.
Here, the preserved tree is essential to the success of this design. Not only does it protect and color the outdoor patio area, but it also deemphasizes the powerful architecture of the house and brings one’s eye toward the meadow and hills in the distance. Sublime!
Studio William Hefner
Boost sight lines. If your eye travels via a window or door into the backyard, follow the direct axis. Where does your gaze rest? How does your eye move around the backyard when it’s framed by an open shutter or a divided windowpane?
Emphasize the significance of these viewpoints by displaying furniture plants or ornamentation to make a well-defined scene. While it may be minor in the grand scheme of your own landscape, that little point outside your window is a precious piece of property in the backyard.
With this plan, it is possible (and desirable) that each room of your home will offer those inside a gorgeous vignette to observe.
Shirley Bovshow
Balance the composition. Use symmetry or asymmetry to frame a view that’s near or distant, providing the viewer a restful (living) picture to relish.
You can get a formal impact with symmetrical plantings, such as a pair of columnar conifers that indicate an opening to a garden route. Or use an arbor or trellis, centered over a pathway, as can be done so beautifully here.
Suggest asymmetrical balance with man-made or natural sentinels of equal visual weight. For instance, you can cancel a large tree on one side of this view using a group of garden furniture on the other hand. The things may be different, but together they produce an appealing balance.
Kathleen Shaeffer Design, Exterior Spaces
Beckon with passageways. Highlight your garden’s best views by creating areas to look and places to pursue, allowing the delightful destination beyond to be viewed as an impactful expansion of the backyard’s visual reach.
Employ techniques that frame and define An introduction in a compact hedge ignites curiosity about what is beyond. Here, two such openings at a wall — a door and a “window” — are attention-grabbing devices. The remote garden is half concealed, but it’s endowed with heightened drama.
The programmer has created a view in what was once an unnoticed field of the landscape.
Make it decorative. This portal emphsizes the remote vista, but it is itself a sculptural object to look at and love. Even in the winter season, once the blossoms have faded, leaves have dropped from deciduous trees and perennials have expired, this incredible rock moon gate is an essential design element of this landscape.
Nicolock Paving Stones and Retaining Walls
An unforgettable vista. An enthralling remote scene is incorporated into this beautiful landscape using a light hand. Nothing here is contrived, but each aspect of the domestic landscape feels in harmony with all the water, hills and naturalized plantings from the distance.
This layout works due to the positioning and execution of this rock patio, which defines the outdoor gathering place. The plantings during its border are intentionally kept low so they don’t obscure the view of this water. The older trees on either side are lightly pruned to keep low-hanging branches from the sight of these magnificent hills.
More: 10 Elements of an Exuberantly Abundant Garden