Good design is a process in which the needs and wishes of the client are explored and brought into harmony with the existing conditions of the site. The goal is to create outdoor living spaces which are not only beautiful but comfortable, functional and easily maintained.

If you are planning a single flower bed or require an entire site plan, let us help make your dreams a reality in a practical, tasteful and economical manner. We can prepare full presentation drawings or work with you as consultants to get you started in the right direction. AA

AQUA TERRA can now prepare computer aided designs for you. We start by taking a digital image of your existing property and loading it into a design program. From there we can add plants and other objects to the original picture to provide you with a visual preview of what the finished job will look like.

Thumbnail diagrams summarizing the aesthetic principles underlying western garden design 2000 BC-2000AD Western aesthetic theory began with the ‘problem of universals’ or ‘forms’. Taking an understanding of concepts to be of the first importance, Plato’s followers argued that artists should ‘imitate nature’ in the sense of revealing the essential nature of the world through their work. We learn much about general principles by studying details. In garden design, the theory that ‘art should imitate nature’ has operated in three ways: 1. Emphasis on universals (squares, rectangles, circles, axial symmetry) 2. Emphasis on particulars (the wildness and irregularity of the natural world) 3. Emphasis on the relationship between universals and particulars Enclosure. This diagram represents enclosed gardens from the dawn of western civilization to the dawn of the renaissance. Large villas and palaces had rectangular gardens attached to their component buildings. The internal orderliness of the enclosure contrasted with the disorder of the external world. Renaissance. Directionality was introduced to renaissance gardens, reportedly by Bramante. This happened at a time when philosophers were looking to the external world to discover new truths. Baroque. Outward thrust became a distinguishing feature of the Baroque. The geographical extent of the ‘nature’ which was imitated was pushed to the horizon. Mathematics and perspective influenced science and art.  Romantic. William Kent is famed for having ‘leaped the fence’, though, as the above diagrams show, directionality itself was not new. The geometrical character of the nature which was imitated began to shift from the world of the forms to the world of the particulars.  Picturesque. With the advance of empirical science and representational art, the ‘nature’ imitated in garden design became the irregular everyday world of empirical reality.  Landscape. The grand transition from art to nature brought the universal forms and empirical reality into a single composition. The categories of ‘nature’ imitated in garden design included the general and the particular, as in a landscape painting.  Abstract. Artists studied the external world in order to abstract its organizational principles. Designers looked ‘down’ to the real world and ‘up’ to the pure forms.   Postmodern. Art became re-contextualized, with context interpreted in multiple dimensions. Designers, influenced by constructivism, became interested in the overlay of shapes and forms.