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Principles of Design - Dominance

© Kirk Johnson

Many gardeners may be a bit uncomfortable with the idea of the idea of dominance as a design principle. They love all of their plants and want them all to live together in harmony, but a totally harmonious garden will have a design problem because nothing is dominant.

My background is in art and I am very familiar with the difficulties of maintaining one dominant mood in a painting that you have been working on for weeks. It is easy for a painting to have a disjointed quality - to feel like the artist is trying to say too many things at once. This isn't as much of a problem for floral designers because floral designs are usually arranged in one day, but many floral designs try to incorporate too many colors, textures and forms. When nothing is dominant, the viewers aren't sure what the designer is trying to say.

A garden is often developed over a period of decades and often not by a single gardener, so mature gardens often need editing which requires the removal of healthy and beautiful plants. In order to make such a drastic move, the gardener must find in themselves more inner fortitude than it takes to remove objects from a room and place them into storage, but design principles are the same for both garden design and interior design.

It may be easier for some of you to understand dominance as it applies to interior design. I was watching a program on HGTV a while ago where two designers were dealing with a family room's design problems. One of the major problems that they pointed out was that the accessories in this room were a combination of beach/surfer and rustic country. They solved the problem by replacing the beach/surfer objects with objects that supported a country theme. They could also have chosen a beachy theme, but having two conflicting themes in one room created the problem that I pointed out before - it is like a painting in which the artist is trying to say too many things at once.

In this series on the principles of design I have often compared floral design with garden design. When doing a floral design a single branch is often chosen as the dominant element - to provide a unified line that flows throughout the design. This approach can be equally effective when designing very small gardens and can even work in large gardens if there is one large tree with a very dramatic outline, such as the mature cedar of Lebanon shown in the drawing below.

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