One of the core issues people struggle with in naturalistic planting is that the design can feel hard to read and appear chaotic. There are fears about thick, wild vegetation, and many people lack an intuitive understanding of how to navigate these plantings.
However, these gardens don’t have to feel confusing or threatening. With thoughtful design, they can be intuitive and help people know where to go and how to move through the space.
Legibility is our greatest ally in solving these problems and helps us balance ecological richness with human understanding.
What Is Legibility?
I first became aware of legibility in landscapes when I read Planting in a Post-Wild World by Thomas Rainer and Claudia West.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that legibility is part of a broader, research-based framework on how humans perceive landscapes.
One of our core human experiences is gathering information from our surroundings. A glimpse of someone’s face tells us whether he or she is having a bad day. Driving through a new city gives us a gut feeling of safety or unease. And, a few seconds of looking at a landscape gives us clues about how we feel in that space.
Rachel and Stephen Kaplan, environmental psychologists at the University of Michigan, researched how humans experience landscapes as knowledge-gathering organisms. Their work showed that we approach environments in two ways—we seek to understand, and we seek to explore.
Both of these experiences can be either immediate or delayed, forming the foundation of their Landscape Preference Matrix, which identifies four perception factors:
Coherence – Perceiving order in a space by organizing elements into cohesive units (immediate understanding on the 2d visual plane)
Complexity – The richness and contrast of the elements within a scene (immediate exploration on the 2d visual plane)
Legibility – How easy it is to navigate and move through a space (inferred understanding on the 3d ground plane)
Mystery – The promise of more to discover just beyond view (inferred exploration on the 3d ground plane)
Among these, legibility is unique because it involves exploring the three-dimensional space and perceiving how we traverse the ground plane.
Legibility and Mental Mapping
Legibility allows us to build a mental map of where we are in a landscape. If you’ve ever roamed the woods as a child (or an adult!), you’ve likely encountered a thicket of brambles and shrubs, where the next steps were unclear.
What do you do next? You scan the vegetation looking for openings or gaps that are subtle cues that guide movement. You are forming a mental model of the space, even before stepping forward. That’s legibility in action.
We can take that same mental approach and capitalize on it for garden design. The Kaplans emphasized that legibility doesn’t require returning to a starting point—it simply ensures that we feel safe exploring. And safety is often the biggest concern people have about naturalistic plantings. I’ve watched multiple people express fear of snakes or other critters in naturalized spaces, and I’ve heard negative comments about naturalistic plantings because they look unkempt.
Legibility reassures people, helping them feel secure in how they experience and move through a garden. A well-designed landscape promises more ahead while still ensuring safety.
How to Incorporate Legibility Into Designs
Many formal gardens have great legibility. Imposing human order onto the landscape was key. But, with more relaxed natural plantings we have to better communicate legibility within a space. To make naturalistic plantings more readable, we need to consider how humans intuitively navigate space.
Many garden design principles fit into the four Kaplan categories, but legibility is the key to movement and flow. These following strategies are useful if you are trying to make your space more legible.
1. CLEAN EDGES
A mown edge or defined border makes even the wildest naturalistic planting feel intentional and legible. Metal edging or rocks can work well, and in the woods of east Texas I’ve found logs or fallen branches a way of demarcating the edge.
In the Deep South where Bermuda grass is invasive, I keep a dead zone between the border and the surrounding lawn to keep the edge clean and prevent the aggressive grass from growing in.
For wilder plantings in the back forty, mown paths are an easy way to provide visual clarity without severely disrupting the ecology.
A simple mown path through the Sporobolus (prairie dropseed) meadow at Chanticleer.
With clean edges, the taller vegetation doesn’t have to look perfect. We can clearly see the human touch and know where to explore.
Here slit bamboo lengths help convey the clean edge even better.
At Ephemera Farm, logs and fallen branches help highlight the edges of beds.
2. Desire Lines and Paths
One of the earliest forms of legibility is the trodden path (aka desire line) worn into the landscape over time. Humans likely first navigated trails that other animals created before we began forming our own.
Do your plantings accommodate natural movement? Observe where people instinctively walk and consider formalizing those paths. With paths it is also easy to see any issues ahead, and explorers feel a bit safer with a clear way to walk.
On the top of Gregory Bald, this path through the native azaleas has been walked by innumerable people.
A mown path through this prairie helps visitors safely immerse themselves in nature.
The path in the distance at Hillside tells visitors there’s more to explore.
3. Primary and Secondary Axes
A primary axis is a strong, intentional structural line that organizes a space and often acts as a backbone for the layout. They have been used for centuries in garden design to provide structure and order within a landscape. Secondary axes originate off the primary to help people further explore the space.
When I arrived at Ephemera Farm, the first thing I did was establish primary and secondary axes for my garden. I wanted to capture long views that helped the garden feel connected and intimate, and I needed clear driving routes for easy access with my truck. The naturalistic plantings were then planned off of these core lines.
Your garden may already have axes that exist. Is there a sidewalk or driveway? Do you have clear straight views out of the house? These may be areas to use as a backbone for natural plantings.
The gardens of Versailles, the primary axis of all primary axes.
The pathway out of the great hall at Great Dixter is a primary axis through this wildflower meadow.
At the Lurie Garden, there is a primary axis that runs the length of the garden, and multiple pathways branch off of it to allow visitors to explore.
4. Sightlines
Sight lines allow visitors to see different parts of the landscape, which helps create a sense of connection and openness. They differ from axes because they may not be traversable in a straight line.
When I was a guest gardener years ago at Chanticleer, Joe Henderson told me how they had enhanced sight lines to make the garden feel more cohesive.
I’ve visited gardens where tall plants blocked views, making me feel claustrophobic. Simply clearing sightlines can help visitors orient themselves and feel more at ease. Invasive plants like privet can also cause wildscapes to feel enclosed and unreadable. Cutting them out can help to reduce the clutter.
With this sightline at Chanticleer, one can see the plantings on the rock ledge over 400 feet away. Such views help the garden feel more connected and encourage exploration.
5. Focal Points
A focal point—whether a bold plant, sculpture, or seating area—acts as a destination that draws the eye. And, as we are traversing the landscape these icons become wayfinders. A well-designed garden provides a clear, legible pathway toward focal points and invites visitors to explore.
At Northwind Perennial Farm, this boulder pyramid helps orient visitors in the space.
Smiljan Radic's fibreglass pavilion acts as a focal point at the end of Oudolf Field and signals there is more to explore.
6. Entrances
Entrances signal transition—they communicate that there’s more to explore. In traditional gardens, hedges, arbors, and gates create clear demarcations between spaces.
In naturalistic plantings, entrances are often used to buffer urban chaos, creating a soft threshold between built environments and wilder plantings. Even a simple fence can help to increase legibility for the planting.
At Le Jardin Plume (the Feather Garden), the entrance to the garden helps us know where to explore.
Here a gate and fence provides a clear delineation between planting and mown turf.
7. Seeing Over Plantings
Legibility increases when we can see over or through a space. For example, in Piet Oudolf’s gardens, taller plants are placed along the edges, while shorter plants fill the middle—ensuring depth and visibility.
The key is understanding how tall plants will grow and how dense the vegetation will become over time.
At Oudolf Field the taller perennials are on the edges of the plantings while shorter, airy perennials are in the middle and can be easily seen over.
At Ephemera Farm, I like using plants like Arnoglossum plantagineum (Indian plantain) that aren’t too dense to provide views over the plantings.
Legibility and Human Experience
By understanding how humans perceive spaces, we can design naturalistic plantings that feel immersive yet readable. Legibility is a key player in making naturalistic plantings feel welcoming and intuitive, but it doesn’t exist in isolation. Coherence, complexity, legibility, and mystery all work together to shape how we perceive and experience these spaces. Whether you’re a designer, horticulturist, or dedicated gardener, applying these concepts will help you create landscapes that are both ecologically vibrant and inviting to people.
In my Botanic Bootcamp The Preference Matrix for Naturalistic Design I provide a deep dive into coherence, complexity, legibility, and mystery and detail over 20 ways we can design with human preferences in mind. We explore practical strategies to make plantings both ecologically rich and intuitive for visitors.
It’s on sale through Monday February 24!