Contemporary Garden Design

What is contemporary garden design?
Contemporary gardens are immediately recognized by their stark sense of geometry. They are characterized by clean lines, unpredictable angles, and unique geometric shapes. Contemporary garden design styles are highly variable due to the abstract nature of modernesque expression. We build your garden to be more of a direct reflection of your mind than of anything else.

Why is the design important?
Contemporary garden design is best handled by a professional who knows how to balance the subjective expression of your personality with the practical demands of residential landscaping. Your garden has to be built to a scale and scope proportional to your home and surrounding landscape elements. In respects to home architecture, it should complement the materials and architecture of the house. It should also present a scene that appears connected to its surroundings. Since contemporary landscape design is so abstract, it must create its own relationships rather than presuming on relationships between more ordinary forms that exist.

What are the goals of contemporary garden design?
Low maintenance is the foremost goal. Due to its heavy emphasis on geometric forms and relationships, the contemporary garden cannot afford to ever look unkempt or untidy. Vegetation is therefore minimalized, partly to reduce the need for constant trimming and pruning, and partly to emphasize a Mentalist reality where natural life forces are subject to the realm of pure thought.

This emphasis on the mind is intended to challenge the senses, which are by nature attuned to Nature itself, no pun intended. The body always seeks its own form and sense through its experiences. One thing that contemporary garden design always does is move you out of this world of familiar experience and comfort into the world of the unknown.

The garden must give you a feeling of transition or passageway as well. Since the mind is always working, there is no standing still in a contemporary landscape. Either you move through it, or your eye moves through it. Contemporary garden design experts will therefore either build the garden with some form of pathway through it that you and guests can walk through, or they will build it with shapes and materials that move your vision through it on to the next landscape element of interest.

What type of hardscape elements do you use in contemporary garden design?
Pavers are very popular because they interlock together and come in all colors and sizes. We can build a mini-patio with them or create a small stepping stone walkway through the sparse vegetation and unique forms. We can even find you pavers that look like bricks so you can have your own modernesque version of a brick walkway.

What are some of the more unique materials you use in building these gardens?
There are definitely more manmade materials in a contemporary garden than there are organic elements. Like we mentioned earlier, vegetation is minimal. Sometimes, even, fake grass is used to suggest the organic rather than directly experience it. Other materials that we often build include stainless steel and glass. Posts can be erected, then a wire be run between them. Hanging plants can be suspended from this mirror and backed by a translucent piece of glass or mirror that adds vertical impact to the scene.