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Curvilinear landscape design from line of force

February 1, 2014 By Jim 6 Comments

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A while ago, I showed how to create lines of force from your house to help integrate your house into your landscape. In the following post, we created a formal rectangular style design from those lines of force. This time, I will show how the same lines of force can generate a more informal design, a curvilinear landscape design.

It is also fun to consider design some goals. For this big house, we are going to add the following:

  • A large lawn area for the children.
  • A large sunny patio for parties with a pool.
  • Privacy from the neighbors.
  • Benches away from the main areas.

Lines of Force can generate a rectangular design

Here is the grid pattern that was generated from the building last time.

Home-plain-with-lines-of-force-extended

And here is the design pattern that we generated.

A landscape plan with areas identified in perspective

They can also generate a curvilinear landscape design

Instead of using the lines from the grid, we will instead use points of intersections of the grid lines. These points will be used as points in the geometry we create for our informal design pattern.

The geometry that we will be using in our curvilinear design theme will be circles or more accurately portions of circles.

The points will be either be the center of the circle or a portion of the circle.  For example, here are some of the possible ways we could use the grid system from our house.

 

curvilinear landscape design - Laying out the first area
By Laying the centers of the circles out at points where are grid lines meet we can create a flowing shape that ties into the house.
curvilinear landscape design - Laying out the first area from bird's eye view
A bird’s eye view.
curvilinear landscape design - Laying out the patio and pool areas
By tracing a line over the parts of the circles we can create a smooth curving line that can be used to define in this case, our patio and pool area.
curvilinear landscape design - Laying out the patio and pool areas. Bird's eye view.
Another view
curvilinear landscape design - Laying out the turf area
Now lets define our turf area with another set of circles.
curvilinear landscape design - Laying out the turf area by simplifying the circles
Simplifying the circles into one flowing shape that will be used to define our grass area.
curvilinear landscape design - Laying out the turf area by simplifying the circles, Bird's eye view.
Another view.

Our curvilinear landscape design areas defined

We can add some lines that represent a fence along the property line and we have our areas defined.

  • The shape next to house with the pool in it is the hardscape patio area.
  • The blue colored area represents the grass area.
  • The area outside of the grass but within the fenced area are planting beds.
Curvilinear landscape design view from above.
Here is a view of our landscape areas from above.

How this Curvilinear landscape design could look

Now lets looks at how this could look after it is built.  Click on any of these images for a larger version.

 

Curvilinear landscape design could look from above
Here is a view of a potential landscape design from above.

 

Curvilinear landscape design could look from a birds eye view
Here is how this curvilinear landscape design could look from a birds eye view.

 

Curvilinear landscape design view 1
View toward benches from the house.
Curvilinear landscape design view 2
View toward the pool from the open grass area.
Curvilinear landscape design view 3
View toward the bench near the house.
Curvilinear landscape design view 4
View of the patio area, swing set and planting beds.
Curvilinear landscape design view 5
View of the……..ugh……..swing set?
And no if you are asking like my wife did, I am NOT a teenage boy. Well maybe a little bit.

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Filed Under: Design Tagged With: backyard, Curvilinear, design, informal

Comments

  1. Joanna says

    December 12, 2019 at 4:51 am

    Jim, your posts on garden design are very inspiring.

    I wanted to contact you via @mail, but can’t find any address, so I would like to ask here, if I can use some of your drawings from this post on my blog:
    http://podmiejskiogrodek.pl/2019/12/03/jak-wykonac-projekt-ogrodu/
    I belive that this is a great example of how curvilinear design should look like.
    I’m not a garden designer myself and I prefer to show my readers proffessionals’ work as an example (with their consent of course).
    Best regards, Joanna

    Reply
    • Jim says

      December 12, 2019 at 4:50 pm

      Yes you may.

      Reply
  2. Terry says

    November 18, 2015 at 2:08 pm

    Jim, what landscape design software package do you use? At least I’m assuming you’re using ones to create these very good plan visuals.

    Thanks,

    Terry

    Reply
    • Jim says

      November 18, 2015 at 6:54 pm

      Sketchup as well as CAD and Photoshop.

      Reply
  3. steve says

    June 4, 2015 at 3:38 am

    Hi Jim,
    Was just reading over your crab apple pruning in 4 steps. I was wondering if like apple trees we need to be aware of the flower buds and leaf buds when pruning a crab apple? If so, how would this apply to your 4th step of pruning?
    Regards
    Steve stone

    Reply
    • Jim says

      June 7, 2015 at 10:57 am

      Crab apples are Apples trees, the only difference is the size of the fruit, so anything that applies to Apple trees would also apply to Crab apple trees.

      That being said, when I prune a crab apple, I give no consideration to flower and leaf buds.

      If you want maximum blooms, yes we should prune soon after they flower, but they usually have so many blooms I only worry about pruning for structure.

      Reply

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