The design of landscapes can seem like one big act of creativity. You imagine that the design for a whole yard somehow magically comes all at once. That perception makes landscape design harder than it is. What develops design muscles is a series of small repetitive exercises like making better edges, selecting better combinations of plants, understanding how paths move you, or the role of open space as it supports other elements. For a novice, this is very good news. You don’t have to generate a fully-designed landscape plan with every exercise. Instead, you practice one small design task at a time until your eye gets more steady and your pencil more precise.
One of my favorites is an exercise on entrances. Take three houses from memory, from photos or your neighborhood and draw a simple entrance landscape for each, using simple shapes. Consider the focal point, path and door connection and whether plants around the door complement the entry or distract from it. Each exercise should be quick and crude. You’re not being graded for presentation. You’re comparing options. A straight narrow walkway feels different than a curving one, and a symmetrical planting bed feels different than an asymmetrical one. When you repeat the same exercise on the same kind of element several times, you start to see patterns and design choices no longer feel so random.
Another favorite is an exercise in massing. Choose one small landscape planting bed, and do three different versions of it. Version one should be mostly rounded low shapes. Version two should include some upright elements and some low spreading elements. And version three should have more negative space between larger elements. This exercise shows you that designing with plants isn’t just about beautiful plants. It’s also about rhythm, contrast and negative space. One typical mistake is an even distribution of a number of small plants across a planting bed which creates visual static and dilutes the design. A good correction is to cluster plants into more defined groups and have one or two plants provide the design structure while others are supporting.
When the exercises start to feel forced, stop designing and observe. Spend 10 minutes standing in a landscape and observe the relationship between the ground plane, the vertical plane and the planting plane. Observe whether your eye flows or whether it gets stopped. Observe where the line of a bed helps the landscape and where it makes it fussy. Then go home and sketch what you observed without trying to make it beautiful. This exercise is important because landscape design is just as much about observing as it is about drawing. A crude sketch from good observation teaches more than a beautiful sketch from guesses.
I think a five-minute exercise plan in a practice session is a great tool. Spend the first five minutes observing one design element, like the edge of a path or the massing of a planting bed. Spend the next five minutes drawing two different versions of that same design element. And spend the last five minutes comparing the two and writing a sentence about why one works better than the other. Another day, do the same exercise with a different landscape element, like a seating area, a corner bed or transition between a lawn and planting. It keeps your practice focused and you never have the sense that you need to resolve an entire landscape in one practice session.
Most plateaus occur when every sketch you make starts to look like the last sketch you made. That’s when you need to change the exercise, not stop. Try a different shape of property, a smaller area or focus on one design challenge like screening, movement or focal point. You develop design skills with these exercises because they challenge your judgment in a small way. Eventually you see the exercises connect and you feel more confident about designing larger landscapes.