Every great landscape starts with a vision. But when working with native plants and nature-driven design, defining your garden’s aesthetic can feel less straightforward than traditional landscaping templates. How do you create a space that reflects your personal style while embracing ecological function?
In this article, we’ll walk through the key elements of developing your own garden aesthetic that feels intentional, cohesive, and uniquely yours. Whether you’re drawn to wild and free-flowing plantings or a more structured yet naturalistic look, understanding form, texture, and composition will help you shape a landscape that both thrives and resonates with you.
- Our “Garden Aesthetic Continuum”
- Using natural geometry to design your garden
- How to use Layers to maximize both visual impact and ecological function
The Aesthetic Continuum
When thinking of what you want your garden to look like, it is helpful to get an idea of the “continuum” of designed landscapes. I’ve always thought of garden designs existing on a continuum, ranging from formal to naturalistic and from low-maintenance to intensively managed.
Typically a landscape designed for ecological function is going to be more on the naturalistic side of the design axis. The closer you can design your garden to reflect naturally-existing plant communities and interactions, the more wildlife is able to take advantage of your garden. Conversely, if you are constantly pruning, clipping and tidying your garden as is required in more formal landscapes, you aren’t going to give wildlife the undisturbed habitat they need to complete their lifecycles.
The other axis is more of an input/maintenance axis, ranging from a laissez-faire approach to maintenance to a more intensive management. The closer you can get to what are called “climax” communities, the less input you’ll have – For example, here in Indiana the climax forest is a closed canopy hardwood forest varying between oak-hickory and beech-maple. Meadowlands exist on abandoned farmland and “neglected” land.
Meadows can be beautiful and full of flowers, but in the main, in the Eastern USA they are pioneer communities gradually becoming more brushy as the land transitions to woodland and finally forest. A meadow garden offers tremendous ecological function, but it takes a little more effort to maintain in the long run than a woodland garden.
When establishing your personal garden aesthetic it’s important to consider both the visual aesthetic you desire and the amount of time and effort you’re able to invest in your garden. Finding an intersection point between your wants and what you are able to practically do helps you to manage your expectations.
It’s important to remember when developing your aesthetic that, at the end of the day, a garden is still a garden. A garden is a designed landscape, comprised of hardscape and plants, designed for use by humans. You may have a naturalistic aesthetic, but the fingerprints of a gardener’s design and input are still there in a garden, as opposed to a natural area or even conservation project where the forces of nature are given much greater influence. However, even a thoughtfully designed garden can provide ecological benefit if care is taken when selecting plants and designing plantings.
Using Naturalistic Geometry
To achieve a naturalistic effect, take cues from nature when designing your plantings. Whether you are planting trees, designing perennial beds or even installing hardscape, taking into account how geometry works in nature will help you design a more natural-looking garden.
Here are a few of our tips when it comes to designing a naturalistic landscape:
Avoid Straight Lines or Sharp Corners
When studying shapes in nature, it becomes apparent that straight lines are a rarity. Hills and valleys curve and undulate, natural streams and creeks meander, and even most tree trunks aren’t perfectly straight. With the exception of certain straight-growing trees (White pine and Tuliptree spring to mind), it’s rare to see perfectly straight lines in nature.
While straight lines may not be entirely unavoidable – Property lines and driveways are usually fairly straight – Using curves when laying out planting beds and tree plantings helps to create a more true-to-nature aesthetic.
Design with Sweeps and Drifts
Following on from the curved lines, planting in sweeps and drifts helps to establish and maintain a naturalistic aesthetic. If you study high-quality natural areas, you often notice that plant species often exist in large drifts of several square feet, rather than existing singly. This is described as “patch dominance” in ecological terms, and you can use it to your advantage in a garden.
I’ve noticed in our own garden that if you plant in larger drifts, plantings self-maintain more easily. With more individual plants, there is enough of each species to set seed and maintain genetic diversity. An exception to this is if you are planting a single cultivar – We have a lot of Aromatic Aster ‘Raydon’s Favorite’ and I never see seedlings. I am planning to add the variety ‘October Skies’ to encourage better seed set – This will increase the ecological function as well, since more viable seed means more food for seed-eating songbirds over the winter.
Direct Vision with Sightlines
When planting plants, especially trees and shrubs, you have an opportunity to direct vision in your garden. By carefully placing trees and shrubs, you can block and direct views as you desire:
- Direct vision to a desired view – Maybe you want to draw attention to a field or distant view. By framing the view with trees and shrubs, you form a “window” to draw the eye to your desired view.
- Block views – Maybe you can see your neighbor’s HVAC unit, or broken down car in their yard – By planting dense-growing shrubs you effectively block the view of things you’d rather not see.
- Give the eye a path to follow – By increasing the height as you go further away from a spot you typically are standing in, you give a path to trace. For instance, if you have a path, plant low-growing groundcovers close to the path, gradually increasing the height of plants as you go further out from the edges of the path. I always think of a parabolic curve, gradually becoming steeper – You can achieve this with shrubs and finally trees as you go further away from your vantage point.
When using vegetation to direct views, keep in mind the growth rates and mature sizes of the plants you’re planting. A framed view can quickly become a blocked view as vegetation expands and fills in!
Follow the Terrain
When installing plantings, it’s not always easy to lay out where the edges of a bed will be. One helpful thing I’ve found is to follow the natural contour of the land – You might plant a meadow planting on a hillside, transitioning to lawn where a flat spot begins. This helps not only to keep the naturalistic aesthetic, but more practically to reduce runoff and erosion as well.
Create Depth and Texture with Contrast
Contrast, used heavily in professional landscape design, is a powerful tool for creating visual impact. For a home gardener, it can be a secret weapon, bringing depth, texture, and personality to a planting scheme. By thoughtfully pairing elements with contrasting heights, textures, shapes, and colors, you can craft a garden that feels dynamic and engaging rather than flat or one-dimensional.
Contrast exists even in natural settings:
- Pine and Oak forests display contrast in leaf size and shape, in color in the fall, and form in the winter
- In our own Indiana Beech-Maple forests, Wild Ginger (Asarum canadense) contrasts with the commonly associated White Bear Sedge (Carex albursina) and Solomon’s Plume (Smilacina racemosa).
- The plume-shaped racemes of goldenrods (Solidago spp.) contrasts with the flat-topped clusters of Ironweed (Vernonia spp.). Additionally, the golden yellow of Goldenrod contrasts with the deep purple of Ironweed for a multi-faceted contrast.
Types of contrast to keep in mind when developing your aesthetic:
Height & Structure
Differing heights and forms, even within the same plant layer, offer opportunity for contrast. From clump-growing, vertical plants to spreading, colonizing plants, keeping growth habits in mind when designing and planting your landscape will help you to introduce contrast.
Leaf Shape & Texture
In addition to growth habit, there are also leaf textures to work with. Leaves come in all shapes and sizes, and by using highly different leaf forms and shapes, you can provide high textural contrast, even without flowers.
Flower Shape & Form
Leaves may come in all shapes and sizes, but so do flowers. From single to composite blooms, from umbels to panicles and racemes, there is endless opportunity for contrasting in just the shapes of the flowers. Many flowers yield seed heads and fruits that further prolong the effect, even long after the blooms have finished.
Color
Color is another opportunity for introducing contrast. The theory of color combinations is almost a field of study in itself and it would be impossible to sum it up in a few lines, but by using opposite and complementary colors, you introduce one of the most powerful sources of contrast.
Layering for Maximum Effect
When establishing a naturalistic aesthetic, it is especially important to consider a layered landscape. At least here in Eastern North America, a natural landscape is a heavily layered one – From the highest canopy layer down through the understory, shrub layer and herbaceous layer, there are plants in every layer of the landscape, each suited to their specific niche. By using these natural layers, you greatly increase the ecological function of your landscape.
It’s important to remember that the layers will change over time – A meadow consists of primarily herbaceous growth, maybe with a few shrub thickets. Over time, this transitions to forest as canopy trees establish and take over. Similarly in a residential landscape, you may start out with fewer trees, meaning sun-tolerant species have high importance in the beginning phases of a natural landscape.
In the main, there are 5 layers in a forested landscape like we have in Eastern North America:
Canopy
The Canopy layer is comprised of mature forest trees. These are the tallest trees in the forest, forming the uppermost layer of vegetation. Many forest trees grow to giant size, especially in Eastern North America where rainfall is plentiful and the growing season warm – For this reason, it’s important to site canopy trees carefully.
Conventional garden wisdom is to plant trees as far apart as their canopies spread – This is unnecessary in a nature-inspired landscape, as even in mature forests the trees aren’t spaced that far apart. I usually allow for planting 12 to 18 feet apart for canopy species, as this keeps the trees growing straight and with good form as they mature. The trees can always be thinned at a later date, although this likely won’t be necessary for 10 to 20 years.
The canopy of a forest is the most important for sequestering carbon – Trees remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through photosynthesis, storing hundreds of pounds of carbon per tree in their trunks and branches. This effectively removes it from the atmosphere for as long as the tree lives.
The most common canopy trees in Eastern North America are oaks, maples, tulip poplar, hickories, and in some areas evergreens such as pines and hemlocks. Matching your tree species to the forest found in your local ecoregion will yield the best results long-term, especially if you can find trees grown from local provenance seeds.
Understory
In a natural forest, the understory layer is made up of both young specimens of mature canopy species and true understory trees adapted to the lower light levels. The understory varies from nonexistent to rich and lush, depending on natural soil composition and age of the forest.
In the main, a healthy, mature forest will have the most developed understory whereas a forest managed for timber production often has the understory removed since it competes with the canopy trees for nutrients, slowing their growth. In a landscape planned and managed for ecological benefit, however, the goal isn’t the speed of growth of timber, it is fostering and maintaining the layer dynamics.
While it varies by ecoregion, some of the more well-known understory trees in Eastern North America are Eastern Redbud, Flowering Dogwood, and Ironwood.
Shrub Layer
Underneath the canopy and understory is the shrub layer. This is usually comprised of woody plants that have a multi-stemmed or caney habit rather than growing as a single trunk. The line can be blurred, especially with taller growing shrubs that can vary between a shrubby form and a single-stem tree-like form – Some native viburnums, witch hazel and some serviceberry varieties are examples of plants that can be trained to both forms.
The shrub layer, like the understory, is variable – In some areas, especially along creeks and forest edges where there’s a little more light, the shrub layer is lush and dense. However, in some closed-canopy forest types, a shrub layer may be sparse or completely absent. In areas with excessive deer populations, the browse pressure can artificially inhibit a shrub layer.
In the prairies of the midwest, shrub thickets are often the only woody vegetation apart from the occasional oak savannas.
Herbaceous Layer
The herbacous layer in the forest is often the most diverse. This is where most of the “pretty” flowering plants of the forest exist, and in forests of Eastern North America, the flowering primarily occurs in early Spring before the canopy leafs out, allowing the herbaceous layer plants to take advantage of the strengthening Spring sunlight.
Many native woodland perennials are what’s known as “Spring Ephemerals.” They bloom in early spring and then go dormant quickly after as the canopy fills in. By mixing ephemerals with longer persisting plants, you can achieve consecutive flushes of growth and flowering in the same spot, resulting in a highly dynamic, lively landscape.
In a meadow or prairie, herbaceous vegetation is often the only plant life. Because of the high levels of sun in meadows and prairies, these plants are often free-flowering, making them ideal replacements for traditional garden perennials.
Ground Layer
Though not exactly vegetation, a ground layer is very important for a layered landscape as well. In a traditional garden, this is usually comprised of bark mulch, but in a naturalistic garden the ground layer is better comprised of the previous season’s leaves and clippings for a natural mulch.
The ground layer offers a protective cover to the soil, keeping it cool and moist. This gives soil-dwelling insects and invertebrates more quality habitat, as well as protecting soil from the effects of heavy rainfall and frost heaving. The ground layer is also where many woodland birds feed, and by leaving leaves and clippings as a natural mulch you will provide them with plenty of food in the form of the aforementioned bugs.
Now that you’ve established your garden’s aesthetic, it’s time to start selecting the actual plants your garden will be comprised of. Our next article in this section will guide you through the process of figuring out which plant species to use in your design, keeping in mind the layers we’ve gone through.
Next Article: Selecting Plant Species