Choosing The Style Of Your Garden

By gardener | Sep 17, 2008

All garden have styles, just as with furniture and interior decorating. Sometimes styles can be blended and sometimes not. Generally, you want your more intensive formal-looking areas, like roses and annual flower beds, closer to the house; then you can let the garden become more natural as you move farther away.

Adding a small perennial flower bed next to the garage works beautifully. But a yard starts to look funny if you have a Japanese cloud-pruned pine, an English perennial border, some natural-looking shrubs, and a fish pond all at one time. If you live in the woods, among towering forest trees, one sheared bush will look odd. Pollarded trees look good next to the chateaux in France, but they look silly as the only two treated that way out of a row of trees on the parking strip in front of your house. Pollarded trees are the ones pruned to look like 6-foot lollipops.

Below are seven examples of popular garden styles:

1. Formal English: Clipped hedges, roses, knot gardens

2. English Cottage: Lots of fruit trees and perennials rambling around in great profusion

3. Japanese: Highly trained and maintained pines and other trees with masses of low sheared shrubs, placed rocks, and sand seas

4. Early American: Forsythias, quince, peonies, bearded iris

5. Pacific Northwest: Rocks to look like mountain outcroppings, rhododendron, pines, heather, vine maples, Douglas firs

6. Woodland: Tall trees with understory plants and groundcovers

7. Prairie: Grasses and sun-loving wildflowers

You would not put an art deco table next to your French Provincial couch. Be equally careful to blend styles in your yard. A good exercise for you is to start looking at yards as you pass them. When you find one you like, try to put into words what it is that appeals to you. You should know that people go through stages of gardening taste the way they do tastes in clothes or cars. At first people are attracted to the “mixture of color” yards packed with annuals and dahlias. They also like sheared shrubs. They graduate through various styles and stages.

Because people like flowers, horticulturists began to breed bigger and more spectacular flowers on plants and shrubs to dazzle us. These are called “hybrids.” Often the plants have lost many interesting secondary characteristics like scent and interesting sizes, colors, and shapes of leaves. Hybrid rhododendrons look a lot alike most of the year, but species (those are ones existing naturally in the wild) vary greatly in size: some have giant leaves while others are tiny plants. Some species rhododendrons have blue felt called “indementum” under the leaves while others have gold felt. Some smell interesting if you rub or prune them. Some have dangling trumpets for blooms. Species plants are more likely to bloom at a different season or smell good. They also look more “natural.”

There is nothing wrong with any style of yard. You may be torn among several, but eventually your own style will assert itself. Many go full circle and come back to “gaudy” dahlias; others remain true to their first love, perhaps the rose, Still others find new styles that are more suited to their personality. Take some time to look in books and magazines and visit gardens to see what type you identify with most closely.

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