Do Front Landscaping Plants Need to Be the Same on Both Sides?

Balance dark-colored plants with brighter ones.

Balance dark-colored plants with brighter ones.

While the style and structure of your home might offer indications as to how you landscape your front yard, it's really up to you to decide on the design. As with most design issues, whether in landscaping, fashion or art, the design principles are there as guidelines, not as hard-and-fast rules. The design principle in play here is visual balance. Symmetrical balance creates a formal and geometric look in a garden and is relatively easy to do, while asymmetrical balance is more difficult to pull together but creates a casual and informal environment in a yard.

Symmetrical Balance

If your house looks like one in a child's drawing, with the door in the middle of the front of the house, a path leading up to it and identical windows on either side, you already have symmetrical balance. Arranging your front landscaping plants around the door as the central point preserves this symmetry. Trees and other large elements of your landscaping should be the same either side, as should the height, color and arrangements of flowers. Symmetrical landscapes can look static, so vary the design just a little by introducing a small element, such as a different color of flower or a garden ornament, to only one side of the front yard.

Asymmetrical Balance

Asymmetrical balance is more difficult to achieve in your yard as you need to consider the visual weight of the different landscape elements and plants as you place them around the central point, usually the front door. In this arrangement, the landscaping plants on each side of the front door are usually different, leading to an informal and casual look. To tell if you've achieved asymmetrical balance, notice where your attention wanders in your front yard. If you look around the garden almost evenly, or your eye is drawn to the focal point without being distracted, then you have a good design.

Visual Weight

Visual weight is created by using tall plants such as trees, wide plants such as shrubs or a mass planting of dark-colored plants, such as a bed of purple tulips. These serve to anchor the parts of the landscape they are in. Within this, though, some plants add more weight than others: For example, tall, thin trees don't seem as substantial as shorter, sturdy ones, and yellow flowers seem more lightweight than dark red ones. Shape also serves to create weight in a landscape, with geometric plants or plant arrangements appearing to be heavier than organic shapes.

Balancing Visual Weight

To place the landscaping plants in your front yard to create asymmetrical balance, imagine an old-fashioned weighing scale with the balance point at your front door. You need several small bushes on one side of the scale to balance a tree placed on the other side. A large planting of white daises (Bellis perennis) by the front door can be balanced by a group of five golden marigolds (Tagetes) further away on the other side near the opposite corner of the house. Don't forget to think in three-dimensional balance across the width and depth of your whole yard.

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