Picking a design theme for your Hicksville, NY, landscape that incorporates everything from long-range projects to nitty-gritty details is important in the design of the yard of your dreams. Having a truly functional and relaxing room for outdoor living entails careful planning. In the design of your landscape, some of the things that require consideration include architectural style, traffic flow, color harmony, comfort and space requirements. Furthermore, landscape planning has its own challenges, such as providing for privacy and creating shelter against the sun and wind. To ease the planning process and narrow down the huge range of options available, picking a landscape theme is the first step.

Why Go For a Landscape Theme?

A landscape design theme provides inspiration and guidance for decisions about how to create or improve a landscape. The landscape design theme you pick will help in the building of features, determining a signature form, selecting materials, and create a spatial organization that will work together to beautify the property. A landscape theme unifies your landscape and acts as a guide in making plant and material selections. It helps guide where to place and select plants, hardscapes, structures and decorative elements.

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Working with a design theme is important as many of the design decisions that must be made about the landscape will be narrowed down or be formed by default around the central theme. A design theme can be based on the type of landscape you wish to achieve, the architectural style or your home, the shapes and forms you wish to include in your landscape, or a combination of any of the three.

Ideas for Picking a Design Theme

A good place to start when selecting a design theme is to write down a wishlist of properties you’d like your landscape to possess. For example, do you love structure and uncluttered functional spaces? Do you prefer high detail and cozy corners? Would you prefer clean, unbroken lines or meandering lines and organic shapes? Are you in love with the bountiful colors of spring, or do you prefer minimal, low maintenance plantings? Based on these preferences, your landscaper can help you decide on a theme, be it a shape or form theme including strict or loose structure, or a design theme such as rustic, country, beach house, English cottage or modern.

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Considering Lines

Line is an important element to consider in good design. Everything in landscaping involves line. Think of the line created when a lawn ends and the adjacent woods begin. A clear and readily accessible line in the landscape is a sidewalk, fence, or driveway. Therefore, the lines created in the planning and designing of the garden should always be considered whatever you are adding. Four main lines include horizontal, vertical, straight, and curved. None is more important than the others. Narrowing down your line preference is another excellent first step towards deciding on your theme.

Basing Your Theme on Existing Elements

Another good starting point is to base your theme on your home or other permanent structures in your landscape. The style of your home’s architecture, for example, can be extended to your landscape, reflecting shapes and colors contained in the home’s facade. Remember, there’s no right or wrong when it comes to theme, simply a reflection of your tastes and the creation of an outdoor space that will bring you the most enjoyment.

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