Garden Illusions: Up, Down and Around

When landscaping your Minnesota yard, consider creative layouts to create interest.  Curving lines in a garden and changes in levels can make a garden seem bigger and more graceful. Moving soil from one place to another in your garden can create an illusion of greater space. You can form mounds and swales (dips). It doesn’t have to be drastic if you emphasize it be adding planting beds or a set of steps. Even the change of a couple inches can make a difference.
There are a couple of cautions to consider.  You want to have gentle swells and hollows; if you get into abrupt peaks and valleys, they won’t look natural and you may have erosion problems. They also need to be in scale with the garden.
At Architectural Landscape Design, our landscape designers create illusion in a variety of ways. Building raised beds with stone retaining walls, constructing terraces, patios, or decks that are either higher or lower than the surrounding terrain also adds the different dimensions.
The garden skyline is another opportunity to change levels through creating structures such as pergolas, arbors, fences, walls, and trellises. Trellises –  even on a garage wall – draped with grape vines, can add dimension, growing space, and the illusion of visiting another country. Some other ideas a little further from the mainstream are to carefully place mirrors in protected from the climate areas that will reflect plantings and structures.
Or a painted mural on a wall or fence can make the space seem much larger, and invite the viewer to think outside the box. The boundaries of the garden will seem to be even further away if the background is painted so it appears to dwindle in the distance. In plantings if you use dwarf varieties of plants that are usually seen in larger scale the eye is tricked into thinking the scale is bigger and the garden likewise.
If you’re looking to put a little more creativity into your lyard, let us help you effect illusion in your garden.  Call one of our landscape design professionals at 952-292-7712.