When it comes to creating a beautiful landscape design, many professionals opt to use creative accents to draw the eye to their work. Intentional and careful placement of planters can truly enhance the appearance and form of a landscape by creating strong visual focal points. These focal points can serve to break up the space into meaningful zones and provide a central theme around which all the other plants can tie in. Here are some of the best ways to incorporate containers as focus points in your landscape design.
Getting Plants Off The Ground
Whether you have a dedicated walkway or just wide open space, the fact is that many of your plants can be easily ignored if they are blended in at the same level as all the others. With a container, you can highlight a particular plant by bringing it up off the ground and towards eye level. This is especially important if you have a very colorful plant that stands out from the rest. You don’t want it to be ignored or stepped over because it is too low or being shadowed by fillers.
Creating Borders
If you’re hoping to carve out a walkway through your landscape, containers can play an important role. They can be used to create visual guides for the walkway without having tacky borders or fences installed. You can use pillars or just small planters to create borders on either side and fill each one with an accent plant that stands out. Visitors will know immediately to follow the line of planters to the final destination.
Creating Central Gathering Places
If you have an open clearing where you want people to gather, use a container to form a centerpiece. Similar to a fire pit or water feature, a large planter filled with beautiful plants can call people to it. Place benches or other seating around the perimeter to define the gathering space as well. You can even place a planter in the center of a gazebo or pergola at the end of a pathway, or you can plant a tree in the container to create a bit of shade in the gathering space.
Hidden Gems
If you are designing your landscape with a particular artistic or time period theme in mind, you can also use planters to accent the look. For instance, create an ancient hidden garden by letting a few containers poke out from between your other plants. You can even use the planters empty or plant them to look like they have grown into the wilderness. This works especially well with containers that have older European themes in their design. Every time you walk through your landscape you will feel like you’re exploring the lost gardens of an ancient civilization.
Break Up Blank Walls
If your landscape meets up with a solid wall or fence, a planter or container might be the perfect solution to break up the blank space and create a work of art. Placing the container close to the wall will make it pop, and then you can work outwards, layering your landscape for a complete look. Fence posts or trim can serve to “frame” the artwork you have created in the space.
There are dozens of ways to employ a container as a focal point in your landscape design. Just remember that the color and design of the container will play a big part in how it draws the eye. You can use various sizes and shapes of planters at different heights to create focal points of all kinds throughout your landscape or stick to one large planter to form a central theme. For more information about how to bring containers into your design, contact Jay Scotts today.