In designing your own garden, the first thing you have to understand is the principle of landscaping. Creating a beautiful garden isn’t merely a matter of purch3asing the most expensive plants and building a fountain in the middle. It’s more than that, and here are six tips to help you get started.

Having an Eye of Color
Color is one of the five basic elements of landscaping design. Understanding what each one contributes and how they all work together are the basis of every garden blueprint. These elements should be considered when you’re designing the hardscape and softscape of your garden.

In choosing the right colors of your garden, the first thing you have to decide on is whether you wish to create unity or contrast. Upon deciding, the next thing you can do is study the four different categories of colors � primary (blue, yellow, red), secondary (orange, purple, green), tertiary (combination of the first two), and neutral (silver, white, gray, black) � and mixing the right shades.

Lastly, the mood of your garden is largely influenced by your colors so keep that in mind as well!

Determining the Form
Think shape and structure of everything in your garden and how to make them work together. Even the very shape of your leaf could affect your landscaping design. As with color, the first thing you have to consider is whether you’re aiming for unity or contrast.

Drawing a Line
With the element of line, we’re talking about the arrangement of your garden. Where are the plants? Where are the trees? Would it be better to have them face each other, lining paths in your garden? Or would you rather give them separate areas?

Texture and Scale
These other two are the least noticeable of all elements but are nonetheless critical to landscaping design. With texture, you’re talking about the perceived quality of any plant or object in your garden. Texture can be fine, medium, or coarse. Scale, on the other hand, simply refers to the relative size between objects.

Setting an Overall Feel
For an excellent overall feel for your garden, you need to focus on three principles: proportion, unity, and transition.

With proposition, you only have to ask yourself one question: does this (plant or object) fits in or is in proportion with the rest of the garden? In achieving a sense of unity with your garden, you just have to ensure that everything is working together and complementing each other. Don’t let one feature overshadow the other. And finally, transition means a smooth, gradual change or shift from one style to another.

Making Sure People See the Best
Finally, you need to work on focalization, balance, and rhythm. These principles ensure that people’s attentions are immediately drawn to what you want to see, and what they see enhance your garden the best.

Rhythm has to do with creating repeated patterns to set a motif or theme. Balance requires you to review the five core elements of landscaping and ensuring that you’ve given adequate attention to all of them. And finally, there’s focalization: using the ideal combination of principles and elements of landscaping design to draw the eyes to the best features of your garden.