Designing With Plants - Shape and Form

Designing with Plants using their shape or form can be an excellent way of creating structured and interesting focal points within a landscape and garden design. Some Plants have naturally interesting shapes with interesting leave patterns. Others can be pruned creating simple to interesting shapes, to contrast against adjacent wild and sprawling varieties.

Natural Shape and Form (Sculptural)

Sculptural Plants with naturally interesting and striking shapes can be best used as focal points within a garden design when used adjacent ordinary groundcovers and shrubs. Sculptural Plants can also have impressive impact within a landscape design when planted on mass over an area. The repetition of the sculptural Plants striking form can provide a strong geometric and structured design to a space. Some layout ideas are as follows: For a strong geometric pattern, plant at regular intervals based off the spread(diameter) from the centre of each plant. Keep Plants aligned as straight as possible. For a more naturalistic appearance plant in clumps spaced at similar spaces as above but this can vary. To use sculptural Plants as focal points, the use of singular specimens on their own in a smaller garden will be adequately effective but occasionally in a large garden or landscape they can fade into the background too much. To reduce this problem just minimise other planting surrounding it or add a few more so the focal point ends up being a clump.
Some examples of sculptural species are as follows:

Macrozamia communis - Burrawang
Lepidozamia peroffskyana - Scaly or pineapple zamia
Cycas revoluta - Sago Palm
Asplenium nidus - Birds Nest Fern
Doryanthes excelsa - Gymea Lily
Dicksonia antarctica - Soft Tree Fern
Xanthorrhoea spp - Grass Tree

Prune to create form

Pruning shrubs, groundcovers or even trees to shape is another option to create a feature or style a garden.

Plants should be chosen that can be shaped, hedged into simple forms that can create contrast within the garden design. Many Plants can be shaped including some Australian Native Plants. A small list of Plants has been provided below. Designing a garden where Plants are to be regularly pruned to maintain form will require a successful maintenance regime. The Plants will require pruning from early on, to start shaping and improve foliage cover over the plant. If early pruning is avoided some shrubs can become open and woody which is undesirable. There are many ways of using pruned Plants within a garden design. There is the typical formal clipped hedge garden where basically everything is clipped apart from possibly the groundcovers. Then there is the more wild and sprawling planting style with regularly clipped feature Plants formed up in shapes as focal points in the landscape design.

Some good Plants for shaping are:

Buxus microphylla - Japanese Box (Dense growing, prune to shape)
Westringia species - (Native - prune regularly as it can become woody)
Murraya paniculata - Orange Jessimine (fairly forgiving for forgetful gardeners)
Syzygium spp - Lilly Pilly (Native - Good hedging plant)
Trachelospermum jasminoides - Star Jasmine (can be grown as a climber and clipped and also as a low hedge, fast grower)
Dietes iridioides (Grass style plant - can be clipped into a ball)
Lomandra species (Native - Grass style plant - can be clipped into a ball)
Photinia species (good hedging plant)
Michellia figo (good hedging plant)
Callistemon species (Native - prune after flowering as it can become woody)
Melaleuca species (Native - prune after flowering as it can become woody)

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