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Principles of Design - Balance


The Handbook For Flower Shows tells flower show judges to look for an imaginary axis, so I suppose that a good judge could see one in my triangular design. My inability to see the axis may be connected with decades of looking at 16th and 17th century European art and architecture. I may have learned where to place the axis in a triangular composition by looking at masterpieces, or I may just naturally have a gift for doing that. It is probably like speaking a language. When speaking your native tongue, you will follow a lot of rules that you never consciously learned.

I am glad that I decided against becoming a flower show judge. It would be very difficult for me to stick to the rules in the handbook when judging a design.

It may be easier to talk about balance when a design lacks it. The photograph below is of an arrangement that I did at the end of the library counter. All three of the designs shown in this article were displayed on the 4th of July.

This was a fun design because the red Crocosmia 'Lucifer' towered over everyone, so it got an immediate response from them. The photo was taken early in the morning. Those yellow flower buds are Saint John's Wort (a bush Hypericum). Within two hours those buds were fully open, so there was more yellow in the design, but not enough to really balance the arrangement. The tall yellow flowers are a species Peruvian lily (Alstromeria aurantiaca). If I had more of them in bloom, the arrangement might be better balanced. This is a side view of the arrangement and it did work better from the front, but the composition is awkward.

I had two compositions going on in this arrangement. The yellow flowers formed a loose triangle and the red flowers formed a fountain. There are yellow crocosmia hybrids. I don't grow them in my garden, but if I had arranged them among the red ones, the design would have been much better balanced. The composition would have been fountain shaped and the existing yellow triangle would have just given the design more weight.

You may be wondering how this relates to garden design. Please notice that the flowers are arranged in three crocks. This was my first attempt at a synergistic design. A synergistic design is supposed to be composed out of at least three or more

The copyright of the article Principles of Design - Balance in Garden Design is owned by Kirk Johnson. Permission to republish Principles of Design - Balance in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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