Summary: Finding the right garden style with so many backyard landscape ideas and possibilities can be a challenge. Do not think backyard landscaping design ideas are only for large landscape projects, a small landscaping design may suit your garden style perfectly.
Question: We have lots of backyard landscape ideas, along with mental pictures on all the landscaping design possiblilties. Our budget is modest and we need to start with a small space and a patio, but we are having a hard time coming up with a “garden style”. What is the best landscape design for a small space? Vanessa, Aspen Hill, Maryland
Answer: Vanessa, where to start in design in the style of the garden does cause some stress. (Read our article on Small Yard Landscape Design here) Very often a homeowner such as yourself has never put much thought about whether there is one kind of garden and backyard landscape design that they like more than another, but if you think a little you will usually discover you do have a preference.
Making a garden for small spaces or large, no matter how simple, is a creative endeavor, and your garden style relate to you – the person who owns it and be in some way a conscious expression of you and your family. A good landscape design professional struggles to find out the kind of garden his client will be most happy with; he knows that it will, in time, take on something of the character of the one who cares for it, and that the feeling of the “home garden” will most likely be preserved if the homeowner takes delight and enjoyment in maintaining it. Remember – Every garden is a chore sometimes, but no real garden is nothing but a chore.
Kinds of Gardens
There are many kinds of gardens. The broad categories of formal and informal represent the crudest kind of classification. Rather than thinking within this framework, it is better for to ask yourself first what garden or backyard landscape designs you have most admired and would most like to live with. Forget if your thoughts jump to a garden more complicated than anything your small space will permit; this is only the first step in the “landscape evolution” of an idea.
Maybe your feeling will be linked to something as intangible as a pattern of light and shade or:
- to an old wall, pool, water garden or patio
- to a garden you knew in childhood
- to a garden that enchanted you in a book
- to a painting
- to bright tropical colors
- to just greenness
- even, to a particular plant
… but whatever it is, let that feeling be the imaginative springboard for your garden style effort. The rules for garden design can be learned; and a garden can obey all of them and be utterly dull. Imagination in the landscape provides the individual quality that captures attention and gives real joy to the garden’s creator. It is the most difficult aspect of gardening to explain, and one of the most important.
Garden Style Landscape Design Driven By Common Sense
It goes without saying that your dream may be curtailed by common sense. No matter what your secret yearnings, for instance, it is unwise to embark on a project for which you are temperamentally or economically unsuited – our imagination can often be a budget buster. Some kinds of landscape designs demand a lot more work than others, and if you are irritated by little fussy jobs or repetitive labor, choose a garden that calls for trees or large shrubs and plenty of rich, self-sustaining ground covers. In construction, use landscpae materials that don’t require painting or other upkeep, and for accents use a garden feature, such as a piece of sculpture, water fountain or pottery, rather than specimen shrubs or clumps of bright flowers.
If, on the other hand, you love to “live in the garden,” and are more interested in small variations than in big effects, make a rock garden or a herb garden or a specific kind of tropical flower garden. If you yearn for the spoils of the harvest and consider flowers a frivolity, plant fruit trees, berry-bearing bushes, herbs and vegetables. Some of the loveliest trees are fruit trees. Many kitchen-garden plants are decorative and can be worked into a general planting: parsley, for example, is a delightful edging plant; strawberries make a splendid ground cover; a number of herbs are pretty border subjects; the Jerusalem artichoke looks like in fact, is — a sunflower. Container gardens can also play a major role on patio landscapes.
There are some who identify their garden with a period in history, such as Colonial times or Shakespeare’s England, because it may have a special appeal to them; such a garden affords scope for scholarly research as well as for horticultural skill. Many old houses lend themselves very well to this kind of garden style.
Do not let small spaces or a small home be a garden design challenge. Size is not a limiting factor in choosing a type of garden style. The Japanese have been centuries in perfecting the development of gardens in very small areas, and there can be no better preparation for organizing a very small area with simplicity and taste than a study of Japanese landscape design. Any style of garden can be beautiful; the important thing is not to let yourself be persuaded to make the kind of garden you don’t want.
