A Beginners Guide to the Different Garden Styles
A Beginners Guide to the Different Garden Styles
Its not uncommon for beginning gardeners to feel a little overwhelmed by the number of gardening styles that exist and the differences between them. Though many people elect to carry out one style, combining several styles into one garden is not only perfectly permissible, it can bring perfectly gorgeous results as well.
However, understanding style differences can be important, so heres a run down on a few of todays most popular gardening styles:
English Garden: The English are noted for their passion for creating gardens big and small, formal and informal. Though the English style actually has several variations, the one that comes most readily to mind is the English cottage garden. Filled with profusions of closely spaced flowers of all types, sizes and colors, including climbing roses and other flowering plants on trellises and garden walls, the cottage garden usually also has culinary herbs planted in a border or sprinkled in amongst beds filled with flowers planted for color and bouquets. Though they appear delightfully casual, English cottage gardens are not haphazard creations; much thought is given to organizing the numerous flowers and plants to best advantage.
Wild Garden: An Irish nineteenth-century garden designer named William Robinson popularized the wild garden. Designed to look as if Mother Nature herself had planted them, wild gardens can feature both native and exotic plants. Larger plants such as evergreens that would be pruned into severe shapes in a formal garden are allowed to go wild and be pruned only when their growth threatens to overshadow or push out neighboring plants. Smaller plants such as annuals, herbs and flowering perennials are similarly left to their own devices with little human intervention. Paths in a wild garden do not appear to have been planned, but meander as they do in a forest. However, to achieve the desired natural appearance, much thought must be given to plant choices for this garden type.
Formal: A formal garden is one in which flowers and shrubbery are planted symmetrically, often in geometric patterns, and frequently maintained. Hedges are kept well clipped and footpaths are well delineated and frequently placed between flower beds that surround a central garden statuary or a gazebo, arched trellis or other focal point. Unlike wild gardens that may use large rocks to provide a space for people to sit and enjoy the area, formal gardens use stone benches for seating. A good example of a formal is the Boboli Gardens behind the Pitti Palace in Florence Italy. Its terraced slopes and carefully tended plantings assert human control over nature.
Perennial Garden: Because perennial plants are plants that live for three years or more, perennial gardens require less frequent planting than do gardens that feature annuals, or flowers and plants with a one-year life span. Perennial plants include most evergreens, roses and flowering bulbs such as iris and daffodils that come up and bloom for several years in a row before needing to be separated and replanted. Most cultivated perennials require at least a half a day of sun or more and well-drained soils; however, some perennials will grow in shady or wetter environments as well.
A particularly wonderful variation of the perennial garden is the English hedgerow, often used instead of wood or wire fencing to contain livestock in pastures. Hedgerows are made by planting trees as regular intervals, then planting large shrubs between the trees and allowing them to grow unchecked until the pasture is surrounded by a dense hedge that, unlike wood or
wire fencing, becomes lovelier and more effective as years go by.
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