Centering your Houston Landscape Design around Your Garden

What do you mean as a designer by “centering”? Does that mean the center of the yard?
No, in terms of organization, it means centering the garden on the main access to the house. Typically there is a centerpoint to a home and a corridor that runs through the property to it.

A garden can often be centered on this. If this is not possible, there are rooms that setup view corridors to the Houston landscape. The garden(s) can be centered on these corridors. In effect, we are always working off a central axis of the home somewhere, somehow.

What is a view corridor, and where are they found?
Anything that gives you a view of the Houston landscape is a view corridor. From the perspective of the house proper, such corridors would include windows, doorways, and walkways of ingress (going into the home) and egress (going out of the home.)

Does the garden have to be a certain size?
A garden never is limited by size. The issue here is scope and scale. You want your garden to be proportional to the house and yard.

A master landscape design plan for a townhouse may call for a garden that is only six feet wide. On the other hand, a three acre estate may have a 200 foot garden in the back yard. The whole point is to make the garden proportional to the central access corridor inside the home.

Does every landscape master plan have this attribute?
No, but it is a driving principle of professional landscape design. Some plans in certain unique instances do not involve the planting of gardens. However, almost every other Houston landscape project we do will involve at least one garden, and the principle of centering it applies according to the guidelines discussed here.

When are their exceptions to this rule?
Sometimes gardens are planted to the side of the house and off the axis of the main transit points. They can also be planted alongside of curved, linear, and natural walkways that lead away from architecture to remote or private destinations in the back of a yard.

Gardens planted along these walkway are not intended to support the form of a building, but rather communicate the idea of moving into a highly differentiated and unique portion of the Houston landscape set aside for special interests and activities.

Do you normally integrate inorganic into a garden?
Yes, we frequently integrate elements such as fountains, gravel, masonry walls, linear planters, mirrors, glass, steel beams, and trellises.

Do every plant gardens inside of hardscapes?
No, but we will leave areas open to plant flowers, grass, small trees. We can plant herbs and dwarf grasses to make it look older. Sometimes we can build a natural retaining wall with ferns growing out of it. This could be seen as gardens in a sense because they integrate greenery into stonework and concrete.

This is done in both the front yard and back yard?
Yes. We plant gardens in both, but the back yard almost always provides more design opportunities. Front yard gardens are limited by the perspective of front ingress and the front door.