Abstract:Agricultural landscape is the core carrier of regional culture and has great significance for landscape diversity. From the perspective of the Jiangnan water town metropolitan area, this article summarizes the main challenges currently faced by agricultural landscapes: the disappearance of regional landscape characteristics, the inability to adapt to diverse functional needs, and limitations imposed by rigid constraints on landscape functions. Taking the agricultural landscape design of the three gardens in the Water Town Parlor in the Yangtze River Delta as a case study and presenting the framework of landscape design elements of the three types of agricultural display gardens in the Jiangnan polder field, mulberry-based fish pond, and the water town wetland, this paper puts forward the concept of balanced landscape design, that is, a new way of agricultural landscape design between landscape agriculture and agricultural landscape. It divides the agricultural space into productive elements, landscape elements, and elements with both production and landscape, and advocates for targeted design and management of these three types of elements to balance food production and landscape ecology and to integrate functions such as landscape, ecology, and culture into traditional agricultural spaces.