Is it necessary, or is there some unwritten garden law or regulation that requires you to include garden decor items as focal points in your garden. No of course there isn’t. Focal points are just elements of design, either exterior or interior that most professional designers utilize to make the space they are creating more personal to the home owner, and different from the rest of the neighborhood. Particularly in garden design where gardens occupying the same grow zone will often be found all growing the same “very popular ” garden plants ,to include items of garden decor of personal significance to the home owner makes that garden retreat less like its neighbors.
If it is your choice to border your garden space with groups of the same plants, or individual plant specimens or create a Hodge podge of informal garden mayhem, it’s your garden in which you are king and rule supreme; there are no rules except yours and Mother Nature’s.

If you do decide to dabble with garden decor pieces with the intention of directing the eye to certain garden features the choice of garden decor to utilize as focal points is boundless and only governed by your personal tastes and imagination . Anything that provides interest through size, shape or color can be a focal feature.

You may find this occupation far more enjoyable and rewarding if you search out objects or pieces of garden decor that you love and that make some kind of personal statement for you, and then find a suitable spot in your garden to be their new home .Rather than scouring the internet or physically making the trek to every garden center in and around the city where you live in the attempt to hunt down that perfect piece of garden decor to fill a particular space.
Pieces of garden decor used for either large or small garden statements should ideally, look like they have always been a part of a garden, they should not look out of place ,or step with either the garden itself or other pieces of garden decor used as decoration around it. This is not to imply that they need appear to be either old, or time worn, just at home in what surrounds them.

Just in case anyone is still left a little uncertain as to what significance or role garden decor pieces play in the garden landscape check out these images ,sorry that they could not be more spectacular examples ,but my meager paint shop talents wouldn’t allow it ,but even from these, you get the general idea.

I’ll try to demonstrate some techniques of placing garden decor items as focal points or as vignettes in the following photographs, but positioning an item of garden decor as a focal point whether it be a statue or a specimen plant it’s pretty much a movable feast leaving the plants in their pots of course until a final location is decided upon, the placing of garden decor is largely a matter of trial and error. The more you do of it, the more experienced and skilled you will become and the better trained your eye will be at ideally placing that piece of garden decor into its best location, without the physical labor of having to carry a heavy item  to several possible location sites before it finds rest in its permanent place of residence.

Where is a Good Spot to Place an Item of Garden Decor to be a Focal Point

First rule there aren’t any rules, but if it helps you out this is how I often go about it. First  don’t even  leave the house  look out at the garden  from all windows that have garden views ,this applies to front gardens facing the street  and rear gardens backing on to the neighbor’s yard. The first place I position  a piece of garden decor is so it creates a focus aspect for every window that has a garden view, something wonderful to look at outside ,that just calls to you to go out and use it ,or inspect it from closer quarters ,or just something pretty to look at through the window on a rainy day. Remember to of course position focal points where they are easily seen.
Next go outside to seating areas patio’s and decks ,even  stand on the street to see which  spots of the yard catch peoples  interest as they pass by. A good piece of garden decor used as a focal point will draw the eye and capture the attention with some aspect of it that piques the curiosity or intrigues the imagination.

This is not to imply that if we have seven rooms with garden views, a patio, plus 3 additional seating areas, that we should create eleven or more focal points in the backyard alone. Many aspects can often share the same item of strategically placed garden decor, remember the eye is drawn by the focal point ,so long as the statue or plant or whatever item you are working with  so long as it is within view of the window, the eye will naturally gravitate towards it.

But another thing to bear in mind that when viewing arrangements of plants flowers and garden decor art pieces through a widow the widow frame often acts like a picture frame so it is often desirable to center some particular element of the  grouping for each window view. You can map out future sites for garden decor compositions by attaching brightly colored scarves or even balloons to garden stakes and inserting them into the ground at various spots to see how they line up from different windows.

Another general rule of thumb to bear in mind apart from making the whole picture blend cohesively is that it is often useful to have plant collections, narrow single color borders, or pathways and other, gentler garden design aspects lead up to the focal point.

No prizes for guessing which pieces of garden decor are acting as focal points in these photo’s, but did you notice that all focal objects are items of garden decor that are white in color, white is an excellent color choice to use as a focal point, it draws the eye even to the simplest and most common place objects, the garden chairs in the second shot would not have been anywhere nearly as eye catching in any other color. Look at the positioning of each pagoda in the 3rd and 4th images in the last picture the pagoda is positioned traditionally so that there is space on all sides to walk around it , where in the third image obviously a much smaller garden, the pagoda is pushed as far into the corner of the small yard as it will possibly go, it is even elevated beyond ground level, I assume so  that the occupants seated in the pagoda can take full advantage of the ocean or lake view you can just about make out in the pictures background. The unique positioning of the pagoda not only allows a large sized piece of garden decor to be used in  a small space that a structure this large would usually overpower but it serves a functional value that no other item of garden decor could full fill in its place. Don’t ever be afraid to use pieces of garden decor in nontraditional ways.