Landscape designer and author Julie Moir Messervy shares with us some of her insights into composing landscapes from her latest book "Home Outside:Creating the Landscape You Love," The Taunton Press, 2009. Photo above courtesy Ron Rule Consultants.

Believe it or not, most of us have an innate understanding of what constitutes good design: We know what looks right when we see it. But when it comes to making aesthetic decisions ourselves, we often freeze because we don’t know how, or where, to begin—or we’re afraid to make changes or add things that seem so “permanent.” Spatial composition is really very simple—it’s all about relationships: relationships between you and an object (when you contemplate a statue, for instance), between one object and another (when a bench is placed facing a distant view), or between many objects together (like a grove of trees or a collection of birdhouses).

Take a look at your site. If it’s a newly developed property, you’ll need to add features to create the landscape that you want. Where you place each new feature in relationship to others is what this chapter is about. If it’s an older property, with mature plantings, walls, outbuildings, and other existing elements, you’ll need to decide what to keep, what to take away, and what to add to form the landscape that you want.

Auditing Energy
It may sound strange, but the first thing I do when I visit a new property is to perform a kind of mental “energy audit” on the landscape. I’m not talking about reviewing the efficient use of electrical energy on a site. What I check for are the “forces”—their direction and magnitude—that radiate from each particular site and the house, vegetation, and landscape elements that sit upon it.

The two homes I grew up in each possessed a different kind of energy. Our first house was a new colonial in a subdivision in Illinois, built on former pastureland. The only feature on the property besides the house was a large maple tree; everything else on our half acre of grass was flat, open, and bland. As you looked out from the house, there was initially nothing to draw your attention or to stop your eye except the edge of the forest beyond the property line. Over the 11 years we lived there, my parents added landscape elements: stone walls, an arbor, a brick patio, a large vegetable garden, a swing set, and a new garage, creating frames and focal points that caught the eye and focused the energies there.

Our next home, sited on a wooded hillside in Connecticut, was a stately house with formal flower gardens built on terraces. Here, the problem was the exactopposite of our first home: Every space in the large backyard was filled up with flower beds, narrow paths, and overgrown trees so that it all felt chaotic and uncontrolled and too much for a busy family to care for. What we ended up doing was give the property more “breathing room” by turning some of those high-maintenance landscapes back into grass. In both cases, by adding or subtracting elements we found ways to manage the energy to create visually satisfying homes outside.

There are two ways to “see” your landscape: in focus, when you observe the details of objects such as the cherry tree in the foreground, or out of focus, when you’re aware of the general shape and abstract patterns of groupings of elements like the blurry ball in the background. When you blur the details and see the landscape in the abstract, it’s easier to see how to place the pieces. Above photo courtesy of Genevieve Russell.