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Friday, February 7, 2025
Growing Together: Elevate your garden by adding flow to the landscape
Creating a sense of flow in a garden refers to two different aspects of the landscape: How you move through the landscape physically and how the eye moves through the landscape visually.

Like most gardeners, you have most likely been slowly plugging along with your garden, adding more gardens as time and budget allow for.

Unfortunately, the end results could look like all afterthoughts. 

Nothing seems to connect with or blend with each other. After all that hard work, it is discouraging to see that you are not satisfied with what you have done.

It still does not capture your eye like you thought it would. Everything seems disconnected from the other elements. 

What is missing is the sense of flow. It is the sense of flow that creates unity and peacefulness in the landscape.

Creating a sense of flow in a garden refers to two different aspects of the landscape. 

It can refer to the way that people move through the space physically. That might be with the use of a pathway that will lead your guests down the side of a home or from a patio to a gazebo.  

Also, the use of structures can create a sense of flow. A well-placed arbour will draw someone to venture in a certain direction to see what is beyond.   

As well as the physical sense of flow with your landscape, the sense of flow also refers to how it visually leads the eye continuously around the garden. 

To create flow and unity in your landscape, you need to learn how to guide a person’s eye from one garden area to another or from one element to the next. To create flow, you need to have a line that continually runs throughout the landscape.

This line could be the outline of a garden blending into the shape of a patio. It is important to understand that wherever a line stops or your eye stops as it goes around the garden, so too does the sense of flow stop.

Before you begin to make any decisions about how you are going to create a sense of flow, there are a couple of things to think about.

One of the big decisions that you need to make is whether to have beds and other elements in the garden (decks, patios etc.) with curved lines or to go with more straight, geometric lines. There is no right or wrong answer to that question, but there are some considerations to look at.

The first consideration is the garden style that you have chosen. This will help dictate what types of lines that you should go with.

Curved lines are better suited for more informal and natural-type gardens. So, if your style is cottage, woodland, natural or traditional, curved lines will help to convey that style better. Beds with curved lines follow the natural terrain as nothing in nature happens in straight lines.

Straight lines create more of a formal look. The formal gardens rely greatly on symmetry. The geometric shape selected may be copied from an architectural feature found on your home.

The second consideration is the feeling that you want to convey.

The human eye follows curves more easily than straight lines. Curved bed shapes allow the eye to follow the outline slowly, taking in more of the garden. A garden with curved lines is more relaxing.  

Gardens with strong geometric lines have a much sharper, more precise look to them.  Your eye quickly follows the lines to the end points. They can still create the sense of flow.

This style appeals to those people who like a clean, tidy, crisp look. It conveys more of an orderly and uncluttered look. 

If you have a smaller space, especially a long, but narrow space, going to geometric lines will help to make your space feel larger. 

Doing a similar look with curved lines will take up more space both physically and visually.

Once you have connected elements in your garden together, creating that sense of flow, you will find your garden will suddenly become a more peaceful place to spend your time.

Joanne Young is a Niagara-on-the-Lake garden expert and coach. See her website at joanneyoung.ca

The Niagara-on-the-Lake Horticultural Society is pleased to be hosting a series of Saturday morning gardening classes, available to the public. They will be facilitated by Joanne Young starting on March 1 and will run until May 31. Join us for the classes that interest you. For all the details and to pre-register for the classes, visit notlhortsociety.com/classes.

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