Hello Lisa.

Welcome back to another edition of THE PENCIL CASE! Each issue invites a fresh way of thinking about garden design and graphics. This week, we’re talking about the ELEMENTS OF PLANTING DESIGN: the lovely trio of form, texture, and color that provide the aesthetic framework for arranging plants in your garden.

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Before we get into it, a quick heads-up on a few things happening right now related to this topic:

The Collective Bootcamp: The Elements of Planting Design is now open for registration.

The Garden Design Collective, our monthly membership, is also open for enrollment if you’d like to go deeper with ongoing support.

And why not have a third bonus…our Structure + Soul Masterclass is also available. Whew!

More on all three towards the end of this newsletter.

Let’s jump in. ♥︎

THE THREE ELEMENTS THAT HOLD A PLANTING TOGETHER

When we choose plants, there’s a lot to consider, such as environment, ecology, and function. Then there’s aesthetics, which is where the elements of planting design come in, including form, texture, and color.

FORM is the overall structure,

TEXTURE is the visual quality of the foliage that creates contrast, and

COLOR is the dynamic movement and emphasis that shifts through the seasons.

FORM: THE ARCHITECTURE

Form is the overall shape of a plant: its height, width, and depth. It can be round, upright, arching, spreading, pyramidal, vase-shaped, weeping, and more. As you learn plants, make sure you also take note of their form. If color disappeared tomorrow, a planting with strong, well-composed forms would still hold together. Form is the most consistent of the three elements and gives your planting structure and “bones” through the year. Here is a past newsletter on form if you'd like to explore this more.

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TEXTURE: VISUAL CONTRAST

Texture is the visual appearance of a plant’s foliage, especially its leaf size, shape, and density. It sits in the middle: more changeable than form, but much more present throughout the season than color.

A planting with contrasting textures (large leaves against small, narrow leaves against round ones, dense plants against open, airy ones) has built‑in interest, even if everything is mostly green. Too much of the same texture, and the composition can start to feel flat or dull. Here is a past newsletter on texture that describes this a bit more.

COLOR: THE CHOREOGRAPHY

Color is usually what we fall in love with first…but it’s also the most fleeting, as flowers, in particular, come and go. Color is powerful, but on its own it can’t carry a planting. Where it really shines is when it’s:

• Limited (fewer colors, used more intentionally)
• Repeated (a small set of colors that show up again and again)
• Choreographed over time, or used to intentionally peak at a special moment

A simple shift from “all the colors I love” to “a small set of colors I repeat” is often what makes a planting feel cohesive rather than noisy. I have several blog posts on color here if you'd like to read more.

LET'S DO THIS! 

If this way of looking at planting design is sparking ideas, you’re invited to join The Collective Bootcamp: The Elements of Planting Design, where we’ll walk through these elements in three live sessions together.

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And if you’d like ongoing support beyond the bootcamp, the Garden Design Collective is also open for enrollment. This is our monthly membership that includes an awesome community with lots of landscape design topics.

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If you'd like an umbrella view of design (both space and plants) we'd love to have you join us for our spring STRUCTURE + SOUL masterclasses. Sign up for one here!

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If you know someone that needs design inspiration, please feel free to share this newsletter. Anyone can subscribe right here. I also keep a VAULT of past issues in this secret location.

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From the studio + garden, 

Lisa 

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PAPER GARDEN WORKSHOP

Thank you to Mandy Orgler for designing the lovely graphics in all these newsletters.