Styling a garden becomes easier if you’re working with a specific theme. If you want to transform your unused outdoor space into a green oasis but are unsure what theme to try, we got your back! We have ten beautiful garden themes that will match every taste and mood.
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Garden Themes for Home Gardening
Dress up your garden with a specific theme. Here are ten amazing ideas for home gardening that will turn your yard into a beautiful garden all year long.
English Cottage Garden
You cannot beat the classic! A cottage garden design adds rustic homeyness to your living space. It’s a practical design that looks best in a country-style house. To create a classic cottage garden, use creeping vines to frame the garden. Highlight the garden with low-maintenance plants like wildflowers, hollyhocks, etc. Finish up with a garden patch or a herb garden!
For hardscaping elements, opt for pieces with curved or smooth edges like birth baths or water features to enhance the homey, cozy feel. You can add benches, arbors, flower birds, statues, fountains, garden paths, stone fences, or white picket fences to recreate the landscape of an English garden.
Tea Garden
It feels good to grow your own food, and even better if you can make delicious drinks out of your very own tea garden! For this theme, you can use the entire space or just a section of the garden for tea plants. Camellia sinensis is best grown in hardiness zones 8 to 11. Other plants that can be used to brew teas are chamomile, peppermint, lavender, bee balm, hibiscus, and ginger.
Pollinator Garden
Who wouldn’t want a garden bursting with life? A classic butterfly garden is great, but you can turn this design up a notch by inviting other beneficial critters into your green oasis, such as birds, hummingbirds, and bees! To attract pollinators into your garden, it has to be filled with pollinator-friendly plants like wildflowers, herbs, and flowering plants. Don’t forget to install birdbaths, a small pond, or feeding areas so pollinators will come in droves and call your garden their home!
Japanese Zen Garden
Create a tranquil space with a Japanese Zen garden. Three elements that are seen prominently in a Japanese garden are water features, plants, and a rock garden. The rock garden is often used as the focal point of the space, with manicured evergreen bushes and sculptural trees framing the space. A small koi pond is also a staple in many Asian gardens, especially a Japanese zen garden. But if a pond cannot be installed in your garden, opt for water features.
Herb Garden
An herb garden is one of the quickest ways to make an outdoor space look green, vibrant, and full of life. These plants do not grow too big, so they will fit small to medium-sized spaces, and maintenance is almost effortless. In fact, some herbs thrive on neglect. You can use starter plants to build an herb garden or grow the herbs from seed using an herb kit. Whatever method you use, you’re likely to harvest the herbs within a few weeks.
Salad Garden
If your idea of a garden involves growing your own food, then we highly suggest building a salad garden! You can start with a host of fruit-bearing crops like tomatoes, sweet peppers, carrots, chives, cucumbers, and onions. You can also grow green, leafy vegetables like lettuce, arugula, kale, and cabbage. Finally, grow some herbs that are often used to season salads, like basil, chives, parsley, mint, dill, thyme, and cilantro. By the next harvest season, you can start a barbeque at home and serve fresh, delicious greens to friends and family!
Edible Flower Garden
In the same vein as growing a salad or herb garden, you can build an edible flower garden. Use the blooms to create showstopping desserts, thirst quenchers, and delectable salads. Edible flowers have different flavors; some are tart, and others are spicy or sweet. Rose, lavender, and dandelions have a slightly bitter but sweet flavor, while nasturtiums, chives, and echinacea have a bitter, almost spicy taste. Other edible flowers to grow are calendula, daylily, squash blossoms, pansy, viola, and violets.
Rock Garden
This is perhaps the easiest garden theme to put together. A rock garden doesn’t require many plants to grow; opt for low-maintenance greenery and shade-loving plants to start. The surrounding areas should be decorated with rocks of different sizes and shapes. Use the big stones for sculptures and the small rocks for hardscaping materials. You can also define pathways with small pebbles. Use potted plants to highlight specific areas of the garden to achieve a serene, calming space.
Rose Garden
A rose garden is a popular theme, although it will take more maintenance because some rose varieties are naturally temperamental. Other varieties require more sunlight to produce flowers every season. Thankfully, some are much easier to grow. Knock Out, Little Mischief, Flower Carpet, Scarlet Snowdrift, Paint the Town Home Run, and All the Rage are just some of the many rose varieties that are low maintenance and shade tolerant. To achieve lushness, we suggest playing with colors and heights so that your rose garden will be awash with a riot of colors by spring!
Flower Garden
A classic flower garden is another classic theme that will suit different living spaces. You can grow the flowering plants in-ground or in a raised garden bed – that’s totally up to you. Again, you want to play with textures, colors, and heights to achieve a cohesive design. You can go for flowering plants with complementing or contrasting colors. Zinnia, marigold, sunflowers, catmint, pansies, roses, lilies, cosmos, nasturtiums, lavender, and sweet peas are some of the easiest flowering plants to grow.
Where To Buy Your Garden Tools and Supplies
Creating a beautiful garden doesn’t have to cost a small fortune. With a cohesive theme, you can build a gorgeous garden that you’ll be proud to show off. With these garden designs, we hope to have inspired you to transform your outdoor space!
Make sure that you have the important tools and garden supplies for home gardening. You can hire a professional gardener for landscaping and complex design of your garden theme. But whether you hire someone or choose to do-it-yourself, you must buy your gardening essentials from a reputable store.
ECOgardener is Amazon’s #1 bestseller store for heavy-duty landscape fabric, raised bed, and more. Check out our store or browse our website for more info about our products and promo.