Modern Home Garden

The modern home garden is a contemporary style intended to work as a direct corollary to modern or contemporary home architecture.

The complimentary power of a modern home garden is multi-dimensional. It is a blend of reflection and contrast. Without this juxtaposition of opposing aesthetics, the garden would appear too minimalist and lose its innate power of attention and magnification. However, when opposing corollaries are fused into a focused synthesis, a modern home garden can appear to be as complex and structurally robust as the house whose form it works to enhance.

Lines in the modern home garden are used to reflect linear forms in the home architecture. By lines we mean any hardscape structure or design within a hardscape that moves in a straight progression along a horizontal or vertical axis. This includes the boundaries of the garden as well as decorative elements within it. Some of these designs call for the construction of small architectural walls that loosely resemble a courtyard or entry garden. Others utilize stones or brick laid out in sharp linear patterns and right angles to convey a sense of horizontal and vertical movements. Such progressions mirror the edifice of the home exterior and help create a subconscious sense of framing in the mind of the viewer.

Radii also play an important role in today’s modern home garden. This is because modern architecture often features curves that soften and connect the otherwise harsh and separatist elements of rigid angles and stark linearity. Radii that are either designed into the hardscape itself or generated by a creative planting of dark green, low-level ground cover provide direct visual correspondence to these curved spaces and give the entire edifice a sense of extension.

Keep in mind that we are not talking here about the typical circular forms and compound curves you see in traditional architecture. These are more like arcs and cut-out segments of circles than a truly round geometric design. They are more like fluid line segments that arcs diagonally juxtaposed against intersecting perpendicular lines that create right angles. In architecture, these arcs often add a visual flare to the areas along rooftops and portions of the wall adjacent to windows. In modern home gardens, they can occupy one or more quadrants of a quadrilaterals-shaped planting, or they can shoot off the end of a linear planting to create the illusion of multi-dimensional geometry.

As complex as it sounds, modern home garden design is not so much a complex garden form in and of itself, but rather a collage of simple geometric patterns in vegetation and hardscapes whose near infinite number of combinations compound into images that are representative of the abstract qualities of mind and independent from any recognizable form beyond that of the simple circle, line, angel, or arc.