Garden Styles

     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.  I have found that I perfer a mix of styles for my own garden.

     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.

     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. 

     The cottage garden expresses 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.  Relatively little hard landscaping is necessary for a cottage garden.  Brick paths and perhaps stepping stones through the beds may be enough.  It is the juxtaposition of old fashioned plants and vegetables that creates the casual but colourful look associated with this type of garden. 

     The formal garden looks best near a traditional-style house so the garden echoes and embellishes the home’s 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 property’s edge.

The rustic Italian garden (or Tuscan garden) seems to assimilate very well into the Australian landscape. Aged, muted colors intrinsic to Italian gardens are echoed in our landscape. A focus on Al Fresco dining and entertaining is essential to this style. Planting is often semi-formal – formal and includes topiaries and hedges.

The Woodland Garden usually has an existing canopy, and this style has a soft delicate pallet of under story, shade and partial sun loving plants, dispersed randomly in groupings that mimic nature's distribution in colonies with subtle meandering paths that blanket the forest floor. Typical materials used in the woodland garden are natural like wood and natural stone. The design of a woodland garden should be almost undetectable as it's design is to mimic nature's way of placing plant materials and the use of hardscaping elements such as the foot bridge shown above. The use of a natural appearing water feature or stream, complete with rocks and boulders, can enhance the feeling of nature and add to the authentic feel of the woodland garden space.

The Sculpture Garden are just as the name implies, this garden uses the outdoor garden setting as a platform to appreciate sculpture. A sculpture garden can take on either formal or informal style by including traditional or abstract sculptures. Sometimes hiding a sculpture in a garden setting can add interest and mystery to a garden setting.

Container Gardens are when space is limited or there is no available free soil or ground, container gardens are an attractive and successful substitute for beds. This style usually implies a small space or courtyard limited by the denseness of an urban setting. Containers can be easily moved around for a change and take up very little space. Vary the sizes and shapes of pots, try to group them in different positions and size., plant contrasting textured plants together or complementing colors for exciting plant and container arrangements even in the smallest spaces.

English Garden
English landscape gardening in it's early form was mainly utility in function. Vast deer parks surrounded large estate homes and small knot gardens filled with lilies and tulips may be near the house itself. Orchards and kitchen gardens would be planted further away from the home and paths with walls or hedges flanking them. Later, as the middle class implemented their English garden influence, the style became a more relaxed form of garden design the removal of some of the boundaries and hedges and working the garden into the natural landscape became the foundation of the English Garden we know today. Other influences in the English Style are the of the Palladian architectural style, the Italian use of Sculptures in the garden setting as well as the formal French garden style the uses long lawn vistas. Long lawn views bordered by natural plantings of trees and lush border plantings along natural appearing, but planted trees and shrubs.