Garden design principles

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Garden design has become an applicative art with it's own rules and stylistic manners, having specific functions and meeting certain purposes.  
The fundamental purpose of garden design is to create organized spaces by associating natural elements with artificial ones according to functional, aesthetic and compositional principles in order to improve relations between people and between man and natur.

 
 
Though in the end the beauty of a garden lays in eye of the beholder, there are some principles of design that will serve and assist you in creating the garden of your dreams.

Always look at a garden through five principles: FUNCTIONALITY, PROPORTION, COMPOSITION, HARMONY AND CONTRAST.
 
1. FUNCTIONALITY
Your garden must beautifully and effectively respond to the function you gave it.
Think your garden according to its size, your needs, status (family, children, pets), time available for care and maintenance, front or backyard garden. 

For example, ornamental garden with decorative lawn, lots of plants and shrubs don't go well with kids and pets.
Decorative grasses can't stand neither high traffic nor the high amount of nitrogen from pets urine.
So it won't be long till you'll find yourself struggling with fast lawn degradation, lawn patches and brown spots, broken plants and shrubs.
Consider instead a high traffic lawn with container plants and shrubs.
 
If your green thumb was never really... green, don’t have time for care and maintenance, forget the lawn. Go for container gardening, raise beds and low spreading and slow growing shrubs and coniferous.

You also must bear in mind that function must be compatible with the terrain traits.

An alpine garden might look unnatural when your site and all surrounding terrain is very plane.

If high traffic in nearby, you want to go for some green curtains to minimize noise and pollution.
 
2. PROPORTION
It's very important to harmoniously correlate new design volumes (plants, shrubs, trees, patios, water features) with the available work size.

If you really like water features but have a small garden, don’t squeeze in a pond or a water fall by all means, leaving no space for anything else and messing up proportions.
In the ancient times, the golden number or the golden proportion was considered to be 1:1,6 and thus a rectangle was thought to be the most pleasant geometrical shape to look at. 
 
Also when designing your garden, if to enhance a sense of warmness, comfort and relaxation, you should use a scale somewhere close to human height.   
Among renaissance artists, Leonardo da Vinci used to start from the proportions of a human body in all his creations and art work. 
Don't forget that you have to also correlate proportions with the effects of perspective, which optically shortens distances and deforms objects. When you create a focal point in your garden, you must have a free space available at least twice the height of the key element in order to fully see it.