5 Garden Design Ideas

When designing your garden, you can quickly become overwhelmed with possibilities and obstacles, but don’t fret. Your garden’s layout is crucial to the harmony maintained between the different plants, so they can all grow in the best possible environment. Randomly purchasing plants, shrubs, and trees can be a gamble turning anticipation into regret, but with a few tips, you’ll be able to weather any garden challenge.

Plant Arrangements
Designing your garden is half the fun, but you also want your plants to live well together. Place taller plants in the back and progress to shorter ones as you advance toward the front so they have a pleasant effect. If you monitor bloom times, your garden will be blossoming from spring to fall. A well-planned garden can transform your yard into a showpiece or a peaceful retreat.

Pick a Theme
Your garden design is influenced by your yard and the effect you hope to achieve. Many herbs such as culinary sage provide you with fresh herbs, but the deep blue flowering stems are very beautiful to have in any garden. Medieval gardening is a good example of the intermixing of flowering medicinal and culinary plants and shrubs that served a multi-useful purpose. This design also integrates scythed grasses and fits nicely in with modern manicured mowed lawns.

Divide and Conquer
A split garden can produce a blissful retreat as you divide the garden with a short path up the center leading to a nice sanctuary. With imagination you could add a garden bench or statuary with trellises and flowering vines. This can create a nice retreat for escaping into a good book while being surrounded with calming flowering foliage. Surprisingly this can be done with a relatively small area. Add some wrought iron such as a bench or a few sections of fencing with terracotta planters, using old used bricks for the path and you can create a feeling of old Tuscany.

Try Banking
Banked gardens give height and dimension to a planting area. By banking a corner or creating a berm, (raised areas of soil like mounds), can become a focal point of any yard. You should create the main focus while working around the berm accenting with complimentary shrubs and plants finishing off with nice borders to grant a three-dimensional prospective.

Achieve Zen
Zen gardening is very low maintenance and creates a conceptual abstract ambiance. Evergreens and various mosses are used for ground cover with carefully placed stones, fountains, and small ponds. Introduce simple elements such as pathways and patios to incorporate what elements you have into harmony. Commonly regarded as dry gardens, some or all the landscaping of a Zen garden is ever changing.

Wild and Abstract
With a wild garden, you draw inspiration from the arts. Just be sensitive to color and use shapes with beds that are geometrical using naturalistic planting with conceptual separation or distinctions. Abstract style gardening utilizes industrial materials likes metals, painted wood, glass, and concrete. This garden style works well in urbanized areas where these elements already exist. Think of angles and unique shapes using outdoor furniture, paths, hedges,and water features.

Be creative with your design and in a few alterations your garden can go from ordinary to a unique and functional atmosphere.

Kathy Flute is an avid gardener, and she enjoys writing about personal health, gardening, communication, and  the Top 10 Online Masters in Public Administration.