A budding landscaping architect, are you? Have you been thinking about how best to organize the fresh flood of colors and shapes that spring will inevitably deliver to your business? Or maybe you are a grizzled construction professional in search of fresh ideas? Well, you can always browse the various websites for landscapers, or just wander a park for inspiration. To help you start, we put together this handy little guide on the trending garden types!
Contents
Formal and natural gardens
Let us begin with the everlasting classical debate between the two most prevalent general templates.
Formal gardens feature orderly shapes laid out in pleasing symmetry on the whole. This typically entails a central path with flower beds and pathways on either side, made in mathematically regular shapes. More often than not, these “shapes on the side” come together in a mirror image, or even an arabesque type of layout.
Natural gardens are the most popular of all of the “informal types”. They aim to recreate an “untamed” look.
This idea may or may not entail the use of flora specific to your local area – though if you want to make it look “completely natural”, you certainly should abstain from outlandish plants that clearly do not belong in the locally prevalent kind of habitat. For an insightful look into gardening with local-specific flora, check out this link.
Some of the common methods of achieving a natural aesthetic are letting the plants self-seed, grow, and die off with minimal interference, or incorporating rough rocks and pieces of fallen logs into the space.
Herb gardens
Herb gardens are interesting in that they can mean one little corner of a larger garden layout, or they can make up the entire large landscape.
One great positive side of this garden type is that it is exceedingly migration friendly: a lot of people choose to grow their herbs in containers of various kinds, and when they need to move house, they can just up and take their garden with them.
A classic location for an herb garden is near the back door, if you live in a house, or otherwise near your kitchen – for apartment dwellers, this commonly translates into having a row of small pots in the kitchen windowsill, in which to grow a select few culinary herbs for everyday use.
Resort and rose gardens
These two are allegedly the most luxurious-feeling designs. Resort gardens rely heavily on palm trees, palm shrubs, various ferns, colored foliage, and intensely colorful flowers. They take the tropical aesthetic to the extreme within the given possibilities. Depending on the soil type, watering requirements, and specific types of plants that you use, they can be both high and low maintenance.
A rose garden is just that – an entire landscape dedicated to roses. They often employ low hedges as a way to border off the flower beds and add some clear-cut geometry to the overwhelming mass of shrubbery. Alternatively, a flower bed may feature another, complementary type of shrub coexisting with the rose, or you may choose to section off a part of a larger, differently styled landscape, and make it a rose haven. This option works especially wonderfully in formal garden settings as a feature attraction.
The rose shrubs themselves can be made to fit in with a Mediterranean, “natural”, or even an herb garden, although they tend to look their most beautiful when they are neatly trimmed and arranged in a distinct, elegant, formal pattern.
How to work with your colors
Obviously, colors and their many combinations will play an enormously significant role in your garden planning, execution, and subsequent styling and maintenance. Part of this is purely a matter of aesthetics, but colors have a direct psychological impact on us too – how many times have you been advised to paint your bedroom “something soothing”?
You can use this capacity of colors to stimulate or calm the mind, and achieve some very interesting effects in your landscaping. Setting up the right colors in the right proportions can make a space come vibrantly alive, invoke a sense of dynamics and vitality. Conversely, you could achieve a feeling of serenity, resulting in a peaceful, contemplative, relaxing space. You can even use this to combat your local climate – if you live in a notably hot area, choose plants in cool colors to evoke a feeling of freshness.
When putting together your color theme, you can play with it however you want, but keep in mind that certain elements do have inevitable and invariable effects. For example, a cool color scheme of blues, greens, purples, and whites will make your garden appear larger. Warm colors will bring the space close together.
Plant bright yellow, orange, and intensely red blooms against a backdrop of dark green featuring large leaves to get a stimulating tropical look. To build an appearance of harmony and freshness, opt for white flowers with dark green surroundings, and incorporate silver – either in leaves, shrubbery, or decorations like rocks, paths, or bird baths.
In the end, whatever your style preference, remember that a garden is a living space. Even if your baseline landscape does not cater to your ideas, a little creativity with species and grooming can go a long way!