Garden Designs

If you need inspiration for garden designs, start here. The right landscaping ideas and container gardening combinations can make your backyard an inviting retreat. Whether youre choosing a flower garden design or trying a landscaping idea, the right garden accessories and plants can set the mood youre trying to achieve.

The right details furnish your garden with a welcome style. Which style is yours?

Garden design trends come and go, but certain garden styles continue to maintain their appeal.

Each style possesses its own characteristic details such as particular plants, water features, and hardscape materials. Many features are so strongly identified with a style that they immediately evoke the appropriate mood.

Choosing a garden style that works for you is a matter of taste. You can design your entire garden according to a specific style, but sometimes just a few carefully placed details evoke a style. For Example:

In the Asian tradition, landscape contemplation — in the wild, in a garden, or in a scroll painting — serves as a spiritual experience. The Chinese and Japanese traditionally held sacred the space within a garden and considered the world outside profane. Lake- and island-style gardens, developed in China, influenced Japanese garden design. Some Japanese gardens offer a rustic landscape and contain wet or dry streams and waterfalls, surrounded by ferns, moss, and clipped, gnarled pines.

Whereas cottage gardens express joy and passion for individual plants. They originated centuries ago as humble, fenced-in plots of land kept by cottagers who treasured flora for its usefulness. Livestock and vegetables, berry bushes, fragrant flowers, and herbs for crafts, cooking, and medicine packed the enclosures. In the 19th century, cottage gardens assumed a more romantic aspect. Inspired by paintings that idealized cottage life, gardeners filled dooryards, window boxes, and borders with old-fashioned flowers, bulbs, herbs, roses, and apple trees.

A formal garden looks best near a traditional-style house so the garden echoes and embellishes the homes architecture. Formal gardens are symmetrical, featuring a main pathway or walkway and other pathways branching off the main one. The main pathway or walkway often leads from a specific location near the house to a distant focal point such as a bench, pavilion, or garden swing. By continuing the geometry of the house outdoors, a formal layout creates a transition to a wild or informal landscape at the propertys edge.

Check out our website at www.freewebs.com/garden-designs.

So get out of your old rut of the same old-same old and try something different such as different plant combinations, water features or accessories that you probably havent considered before. Lets garden!!!

Melissa Evans