Gardens are gifts that keep on giving. From empowering our mental health to improving our quality of life, it’s a pocket of paradise many of us consider our refuge particularly during trying times.
We all have a tendency to be unique, whether it relates to personal lifestyle, or to ideas for home arrangements. When it comes to garden styling, you want to make sure that there will be as much greenery, flowers, natural materials, and interesting and functional elements.
Whether you’re looking to redesign your space for the next season or to spruce up a garden from a newly bought home, we got you covered in this article.
Add Flowers or Flowering Plants
Splashes of color break up greens, provide variety, contrast and focal points. Try sowing both annuals and perennial flowers. e.g., cosmos, hydrangeas, sunflowers and marigolds.
You don’t specifically have to plant flowers though. A wide range of herbs and vegetables have beautiful flowers too. These include: chives (purple), spring onions (white), dill (yellow), thyme (pale pink to purple), basils (white or purple), pineapple sage (red), rosemary (purple), rocket (white), as well as all flowering vegetables and fruits.
Use Multi-Functional Edible Herbs and Flowers
Herbs provide fresh ingredients and biological food for the kitchen and make attractive borders and pleasing aromas.
Choose herbs like curly leafed parsley, clumps of chives, mounds of lemon thyme and compact Greek basil with marigolds, violets and tatsoi. Not only do they provide variation in color but add beauty, flavor and structure too.
Group Plants Around a Theme
Create a collection of plants with the same foliage or flower colour for greater impact. Theming an area of your garden by clever use of colour is an easy trick to use. Stand back and take a look at the colours in your garden now. Could you move them around for better effect?
For example, putting a punnet of four or six of the same-coloured flowers in a container for mass planting has a greater effect than just adding one flower. Surrounding these with another contrasting colour will ‘frame’ the picture.
Plan Your Plants
What you plant in your garden is what will always take center stage. All the other elements are supporting acts to the show you’re about to put on for your loved ones and neighbors.
Plan with your future plants in mind. Flowers such as daylilies, astilbes, coreopsis, and bleeding hearts bloom for quite a long time. This provides your garden a stunning color variety, which in turn will attract butterflies. If you want bold and solid colors, peonies and roses are a good start. If you’re mixing it up with an edible garden, be sure to grow the ones that you’re most likely to consume more often.
Use Colorful Pots or Feature Containers
Feature planters can help draw the eye to a focal plant or area. A planter with a splash of color is a simple example of ‘less is more.’
Do you have a special pot that makes a statement? Or a heavy weight pot or one with a beautiful fruit tree or favorite plant in it? You can again use design techniques to make this element look more important.
By contrasting the size of the plants or pots you surround it with, you can create dominance with the pot you want to highlight as the key feature. Ensure the ones you put around it are smaller than the focal pot. This helps to create unity, as the eye focuses on the feature pot and then around the rest of the surrounding garden.
Be Resourceful
Look around your home before you start buying things to beautify your garden with; an old tire can easily be turned into a swing, old clothes repurposed into captivating shades, unused containers to use as pots. Take the time to research and discover all the other ways you can make use of items lying around in your house to make your garden even more picturesque.
Being resourceful not only helps you cut back on your expenses. It also makes your garden your own.