Backyard Landscape Design

You may wonder what seemingly abstract terms like "form" have to do with backyard landscape design. You may object that you're not painting a landscape, after all; you're just putting plants in the ground. Yet it is not coincidental that backyard landscape design shares some terminology with the world of art. The backyard is your canvas; your landscape design skills will determine the beauty of the resulting picture. Since texture is primarily a visual matter in landscape design, we often rely on the relative size of a plant's leaves to draw conclusions about its perceived texture. Yes, plant texture is highly relative: it refers to how the surface of the object is perceived, relative to the objects around it. Thus the plant texture of one bedding plant, for example, might be considered more or less coarse than that of an adjacent plant, due to differences in leaf size.