Choosing a Garden Style That Fits Your Garden and Life
Garden design dictates garden use. Consider a formal garden with neat paths versus a cottage garden where paths are covered in plants and don’t exist. Both styles are valid. Some gardens even incorporate both. The choice is ultimately subjective.
Formal Gardens: Structure and Intent
Designed and controlled gardens prefer a formal style. In a garden like this you can expect to see straight and symmetrical lines and designs. The beds of a garden like this follow a pattern. The paths in a garden like this are paved or designed to be straight. Clipped hedges and topiary provide garden structure. Compared to a wild garden, formal gardens provide a style and focus to a water feature.
Organizing and structuring space is intentional and can help gardens with narrow or small plots feel intentional. However, formal gardens can require a lot of time. If you are someone with limited time, you may find the nature of a formal garden more of a chore. If you are someone who prefers a more calming nature, formal gardens can be very pleasing.
Town gardens, modern houses, and people who enjoy maintenance prefer a formal style. Tall hedges can create privacy. Clipped plants require less space and can provide features. Of stretch and design can create a formal garden on any budget.
Relaxed or Cottage Gardens: Layered Informality
Relaxed gardens have a fuller look, with lots of paths and overflowing borders. Gaps in borders fill themselves with some degree of randomness by self-seeding plants like foxgloves, forget-me-nots, poppies, and ornamental grasses. Trees and shrubs can be pruned, but are left to maintain their own shape and fullness. Lawns are unkempt. Water features are subtle.
Their appearance and design can seem spontaneous, and relaxed gardens can even be more informal with the right choice of plants. Meandering paths can also informally guide movement. Even with all of these elements, relaxed gardens can appear very abundant with little to no chaos.
More depth and layering can be added to large relaxed gardens. These gardens are naturally more informal and easier to maintain if the right conditions are selected, but these gardens do require a lot of planning, especially knowing which plants self-seed the most and, especially, which plants will self-seed the most reliably in which years.
Contemporary Gardens: Clean Lines and Hardscape
Large, frequent use, and minimalist hardscape features are a central design element of contemporary gardens. Borders and paths are often filled with gravel, stone, or wood, and may include highly selective and minimalist collections of plants, especially shrubs and trees. These gardens also may include simple water features and hardscape features that are very linear.
For the most part, these designs require infrequent maintenance, but do have some upkeep compared to the abundance of simpler hardscape designs. These gardens work better in smaller spaces because larger spaces can lend themselves to a more chaotic design, but these gardens are minimalist and intentional and some of the most abundant choices may even seem chaotic to some degree.
A design with minimal surfaces can invoke a sense of coldness, as can a lack of plants. Using a mixture of hardscapes and architectural plants, coupled with textured gravel, mulch, and a select number of trees and shrubs reduces the amount of hardscapes needed, which in turn, makes a design easier to maintain.
Mediterranean and Drought-Tolerant Gardens
Styles of Mediterranean design and gardens influenced by them favor hardscapes over softscapes to avoid water thirsty lawns. Mediterranean design incorporates drought-resistant plants such as lavender and rosemary, olive trees, ornamental grasses, and architectural plants. Stone and gravels are utilized as building materials for paths, while the scarcity of water may be expressed by the inclusion of a water feature. Natural materials and bright colors provide a cozy, comfortable design.
Gardens that are drought resistant require little maintenance and watering once plants are established. Gravel and other hardscapes decrease the growth of harmful weeds, as well as provide excellent drainage and an intentional aesthetic. In arid or water-preserving climates, these designs are beneficial.
Once established, Mediterranean plants require little watering. The designs can be alluring, however, the plants do require a dry and sunny environment and struggle in cold, damp climates.
Wildlife or Naturalistic Gardens
Naturalistic gardens focus on plants that attract and sustain insects, birds, and other wildlife. These gardens, particularly those in the UK, rely heavily on native plants. Areas are intentionally left unmown to encourage pollinators. Water features in these designs sustain life, while providing breeding grounds and drinking water.
These gardens are perfect for folks looking for a touch of nature outside their door and who don’t mind a little extra wildness to their home design. Once established, this style is less labor intensive since you don’t have to fight nature to keep your garden looking nice.
Choosing and Maintaining Your Style
When it comes to style, the three main things to think about are your space, your time, and your temperament. You can’t have a sprawling cottage garden in a tiny urban space. You also can’t have a sunny Mediterranean garden in the shade. The style of garden you choose also has to match the age of your children and the temperament of your pets.
Choose a style that reflects the time and level of commitment you have to maintain a garden. Formal gardens can look sloppy if not cared for while a cottage garden can look purposeful with a bit of maintenance. Wildlife and contemporary gardens are about the same level of maintenance, but the wildlife garden is less work once the plants establish.
The most important thing to think about is what kind of garden you will actually enjoy and want to maintain. If you want to make your space purposeful, think about what will make it restorative. It’s easy to design for what you want and dream, but if you don’t maintain it, you’ve designed a space you really don’t want to be in.