Principles of Design - Rhythm

Many people think that you can't have as much horticultural variety in a formal garden as in an informal garden, but this isn't true. The strong geometric patterns of a formal parterre will give your planting beds rhythm even though the plantings are a riot of color. The same riot in an informal cottage garden will usually require subtle color transitions such as lots of gray foliage or lavender flowers (lavender is a great "blender"). This is because the paths in a typical cottage garden are so modest that they don't give the garden much of a visual line, so rhythm has to be established through the use of color.

If you are using color to establish rhythm in a garden, a limited palette is much easier to manage than a riot of color. Picture a cottage garden of soft pink, lavender and white, accented by brighter pink and rose-red. Without the stronger colors, the garden's rhythms would be pleasing but rather boring. By using the stronger colors like notes of music, you can easily give this garden delightful rhythms that never fail to please.

Another advantage that gardens have over floral arrangements is that in a reasonably mild climate, you can have blooms throughout the year. This allows you design a garden to have rhythms that change from week to week as one plant begins blooming while another stops. Picture a cottage garden with lots of lavender blooms throughout the year. This garden could have a pink and rose-red theme one month and yellow with orange at another time of year.

You could create rhythm by selectively thinning a grove of bamboo, so that as you move through it the individual culms are like notes in a subtle piece of music. Water can also be used to enliven a garden. At the Villa Lante, begun in 1573, water from an aqueduct is lead through a series of fountains beginning at the top of a hillside. The entire garden is formal in structure, although the hillside is softened by a dense planting of trees.

The engraving below is from 1596. I have colored the main water features blue so you can easily understand how water is led down the hillside to the water parterre at the bottom of the print. The water ties the entire garden together. You can imagine the rhythm that it also provides as it tumbles down narrow channels and gushes though

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