Minimalist Landscape Design

Isn’t minimalist landscape design the same thing as contemporary landscape design?
It can be because it follows the same aesthetic principle of “less is more,” but in actuality it is much more than that. Minimalism goes back all the way to ancient Greece and Rome and really is all about a controlled approach to plant life cultivation that emphasizes the imposition of human order and the concepts of symmetry and geometry over the wild random patterns of nature. As such, minimalist tendencies are found in all derivative cultural landscape forms that were either once occupied by Rome or influenced by Greco-Roman principles. Consequently, you can apply this approach to landscaping to your yard if you like regardless of the style of your home or the size of your lot.

Can I do this myself?
This is not a task for the do-it-yourselfer. Minimalist landscape design requires a very precise approach to designing each element with just enough detail as to focus attention and please the senses, but never overwhelm them. At the same time, the entire yard must look like an interrelated array of separate elements conjoined by pathways and lighted corridors of interest. This requires close attention to geometry, proportion, scale, and even the grade of the land itself to pull off effectively.

What does your company focus on when creating a minimalist landscape design?
We focus on the following four elements: gardens, architectural walls, custom patios, and water elements.

Gardens
Successful minimalist garden design hinges on doing just enough with plant material but never overdoing the colors or the number of the plants themselves. This is more practical from both an aesthetic perspective and from an outdoor living. The garden becomes more of an outdoor room that can be experienced than a thing to overwhelm the eye. The trick here is to carefully select plants that will stand out as individual elements that share a common theme of interconnectedness when viewed as a whole. Spacing and geometry are much more important here than crowding lots of different plants together like a miniature jungle of greenery and color.

Architectural Walls
Masonry is every important to minimalist landscape design, and is perhaps the one element other than hedges that has survived since ancient times. Stone has always been a mainstay in building architectural walls, but it can be a very costly one. Bricks can work just as well due to the variety of brick colors and types available to masonry specialists. When we build walls, we make sure that the size of the wall, the color of the walls, and the overall geometry of any outdoor room we build works to contain, focus, and direct the flow of organic energy in the cultivated areas of the garden and the yard.

Custom Patios
Custom patios can be constructed from stone, concrete, brick, even wood to create a solid surface that supports human transit. Most important minimalist landscape design, patios help space out the plant life by occupying areas that would otherwise be filled with too much greenery and color.

Water elements
Water elements are used to highlight points of interest and to center garden outdoor rooms in minimalist landscape design. Many people often forget that the swimming pool is a water element in its own right as well and make the mistake of hiring a swimming pool company to build or remodel their pool. This will always diminish, if not outright destroy, the minimalist nature of the landscape because the pool will not “fit” the geometry and layout of the other elements of the landscape master plan.

Swimming pools should be designed by the landscaping professional just like the fountains, natural points, reflecting ponds, and infinity pools that are often used to punctuate high-end properties. This will ensure that the specifications of the pool respect the home and surrounding property and will provide the pool contractor that we bring in with a better frame of reference to work with.

Minimalist Design

Minimalism can be found in many different types of gardens and landscapes, including formal, French, Italian, Mediterranean, and small garden design. All of these cultures share Greeks and Roman origins. These classical societies were the first to use minimalist in the ancient world for civil engineering and landscaping. Minimalism, to them, was the embodiment of their values of moderation and order.

Minimalist design in architecture and landscaping actually help the Romans condition subject peoples into liking their new lives in the empire. The linear plantings of boxwoods and poplars replaced the wild, chaotic underbrush of jungles and swamps. Topiaries shaped like predatory animals replaced the actual animals that disputed the human position at the top of the food chain.

Of course, the reasons for minimalist design changed greatly after the fall of Rome. It was no longer needed for civil and social conditioning and engineering. However, European aristocracy never lost its fascination for posterity, and sometimes out a megalomaniac desire to rebuild the Roman Empire led to a renewed passion in all things classical. While such Humpty Dumpty maneuverings never made any real political progress, but they did make way for a diversification of classical garden and landscape designs into all of the many cultural forms we are familiar with today.

Again, while none of these landscape designs have to be minimalist by nature, all of share common classical roots and can be customized to Houston landscapes with similar intentions to those of classical landowners. While we may not be fear Nature like our ancestors did, we still want to control it.

Ours obsession with controlling Nature has always been present with humanity since we made a conscious, collective decision not to stop being eaten by other animals. However, since the Industrial Revolution in the late 19th Century, we have become obsessed with controlling almost every aspect of Nature. We are no longer looking to simply control wildlife and ecosystems, but to manipulate the very laws of Nature itself. As a result, the mathematical, the scientific, and the abstract have now replaced the organic and the symbolic elements of art and spirituality.

Geometry is now even more important to minimalist design because it serves as the one link between what remains of the organic world, the architecture of the home, and the abstract realms of human thought. Unlike their classical equivalents, contemporary and modern minimalist gardens and yards do more than try to control and limit natural growth. They actively seek to replace natural elements with inorganic features like hardscapes, rocks, gravel, statuary, and outdoor art. This challenges your sense of order and reality, and it forces you to draw conclusions on an exclusively subjective basis.