Different Garden Style, types and ideas to suit your life style.

Cottage Gardens

Cottage Gardens are a garden style that is most people’s idea of the ideal garden with tall hollyhocks and delphiniums and smaller plants splaying over the gravel path leading up to a rose covered doorway into a thatched roof house.

Usually containing a vegetable plot around the back of the house, with greenhouse and cold frames. This type of garden will not have a lawn but will still be high maintenance.

The paths in cottage gardens are usually practical and go in straight lines from one place to the next to make the most of the available space, whilst the planting can seem a bit hap hazard as the plants are left to self-seed.

Family Gardens

For a family with growing children a garden style with a large patio is important where the children can play within the site of the house. A lawn which connects to a summer house and a seating area.

A paved seating area could also double as a place for hanging out the washing using a rotary clothes line of a smaller diameter.

Around the lawn a good mix of evergreen and deciduous shrubs and perennials gives you all year round colour to the garden.

Wildlife Gardens

The garden style features of a wildlife garden are lack of geometric shapes, longer grass than normal and a mixed planting that reflects the natural habitat of wildlife.

This is not a garden for the fastidious gardener to adopt.

Essentials for a wildlife garden are a pond, native plants and varieties that produce, nectar, seeds and berries, and nooks and crannies for the wildlife.

With this type of garden style you need some shrubs that attract birds such as Berberis darwinii, Cotoneaster cornubia, Privet, Pyracantha, and Rosa glauca.

Trees are hawthorn, holly, alder, buckthorn, spindle and guilder rose.

Plant shrubs and herbaceous plants to attract bees and butterflies e.g. Aubrietia deltoides, Alyssum saxatile, Buddleia alternifolia, sweet william, candytuft, marigolds, michaelmas daisy, lavender, Sedum spectabile.

The wildlife pond needs to provide access and hiding places for frogs, with a gently sloping edge so that any wildlife falling in e.g. hedgehog can safely get out.

Insects, such as flies, gnats and midges will soon colonise the water spending their early years in the pond.

Hedgehogs will be attracted by piles of logs and debris. Add nesting boxes, hang out fat and nuts etc, and keep a fresh supply of water.

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Front Gardens

Front gardens are generally smaller in size than the back garden, therefore claiming less of your budget, but they should also be a show piece to welcome both you and your visitors.

If you have a driveway leading up to the house, soften the edges by planting, heathers, lavender or other small spreading plants.

A canopy over the doorway with a solid platform underneath will form a standing area for your visitors, the canopy structure can be used to support a climbing rose.

A lawn can look good, but is not essential as gravel inset with shaped paving slabs, plants and containerised plants can look equally attractive and require less maintenance.

Low Maintenance Gardens

It is important to create a planting scheme that focuses on easy-care shrubs and plants, rather than on high maintenance herbaceous or other types that require staking, dead heading etc.

Ground cover plants fill in gaps between the shrubs and will keep down the weeds when established. Adding mulch to the beds will mean less watering in the summer months.

Use mainly slow growing evergreen shrubs that will need little or no pruning. A small raised garden pond could provide a focal point.

Shady Gardens

Shady Gardens should be appealing and inviting. Aim for a good range of textural contrast, avoiding all dark foliage, and also grey and variegated foliage which will turn green without sunshine.

Planting Seasonal bulbs are a good idea to brighten up the area. Busy Lizzies, (impatiens) and Honesty, (lunaria), do well in shady areas.

Shrubs such as azaleas, pieris, camellias and rhododendrons all do well, but need an acid soil.

Using pale coloured paving slabs can be used to brighten up the darkest spot, choose a textured finish to avoid slipping on moss or algae.

Formal Gardens

This garden style is suited to houses of a definite architectural style - Georgian, Queen Anne, Victorian etc.

Straight paths and clipped hedges are the main attributes of a formal garden, usually with a focal point at the end of a long path or in the centre of the garden, such as a statue or water feature, (fountain).

One side or one quarter of the garden should be a mirror image of the other side.

The symmetrical nature of a formal garden results in a balanced layout. Geometric shapes and proportion, result in an atmosphere of relaxation.

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