Types of Gardens for Your Landscape Design

Types of Gardens for Your Landscape Design

There are many styles and elements you can integrate into your landscape design to achieve the look and feel you want.  You can create something unique or you can use some standard garden styles as your base.

This article will give you the general idea of the styles and elements in a Cottage type garden, a Japanese type garden, and a Courtyard type garden.  Knowing about the different garden styles can certainly point you in the right direction when you are planning your own landscape design.

The Cottage Garden

The cottage garden landscape design originated in England and was brought to the New England settlement after America was formed.

It is often small, very crowded with blooming flowers, and somewhat unstructured.

The cottage garden will use lots of color, various heights in plantings with tall flowering shrubs in the backdrop.  These are mostly single color variations, like red or white, but you can mix it with a variety of colors.

Shorter, blossoming plants will typically go in front of the backdrop.  These usually complimentary colored flowers combine well with the shrubs in the background.

Often times a cottage garden will have a white picket fence involved, which adds to the charm of this type of garden.

Other elements in a cottage gardenlandscape design can be various types of climbing vegetables and plants.  Many people even grow herbs in their cottage garden.  The cottage garden is most well known for being a flexible, flowing garden that needs very little pruning.

The Japanese Garden

The Japanese garden is more of a quiet refuge where you might meditate, practice yoga or just take a moment to relax.  Generally, it is an enclosed garden and is very simple in its design.  In fact, the landscape design will almost appear as if the design is random, but usually, it is asymmetrical and its design is very well thought out for a meditative type purpose.

The Japanese garden landscape design will involve only a few plantings and offer very little color.  The appeal of this type of garden is its general atmosphere as opposed to a breathtaking beauty.  This why this type of garden is very practical as a place to meditate and to be alone with one’s own thoughts.

A unique feature of the Japanese garden landscape design is its inclusion of artifacts and structures.  These do not have to be true, expensive artifacts of the past.  What you want to shoot for is an old, weathered look.

Other great features of the Japanese type Garden landscape design include use of a full sized statue and a stone water basin.  Instead of going all out or using many miniature statues, the Japanese garden will often include only one piece that is quite large.

The Courtyard Garden

The Courtyard garden landscape design is very popular in locations like California and Mexico.  These create a private oasis that is isolated from the desert landscape that is typical of those geographical areas.

You can enter most Courtyard Gardens from different rooms of the home, almost as if you were stepping out onto a patio.  These are very common with Spanish architecture and usually contain some type of water fountain or perhaps even a waterfall.

The Courtyard garden should be very lush, and visually beautiful, offering a lot of fragrance and an abundance of color.  Some designs display tropical-like plants that can adapt themselves to the region, plus - with the installation of a water system, these types of plants do well planted next to a small water garden inside the courtyard.

Another great feature of the Courtyard garden is the use of colored tiles (or paving stones) that are set in natural patterns, so that they blend in well with the landscape.

The suggestion is, before you begin design your own landscape design, look at several pictures of these types of gardens to determine which best suits your needs, your taste and your own individual style.  With solid planning, you may even be able to use elements from all three of these types of gardens types to create something special of your own.

To see some books and products that might assist with your landscape design, you might use the link below to visit amazon.  Best of luck!

More on Landscaping Projects at Amazon:   http://amzn.to/15qM7i8

P.S.>  If you want to see more great reviews, please subscribe to Sincere Product Reviews