Garden style ideas – find the one that’s perfect for you
If you’re planning or re-vamping a garden, then start with a list of garden style ideas.
A good garden style can often be summed up in one word. Or it may be a phrase or a trend. It may be a feeling or a philosophy.
But once you’ve decided what you want to see and feel when you step out into your garden, then it simplifies your choices. Instead of being faced with a confusing array of options in plants, hard landscaping and garden furniture, you’ll be able to focus on what’s right for you.
There are two ways of choosing a garden style. One is to look at a list of classic garden styles and see which one appeals to you. The second is to consider a theme, philosophy or approach based on your garden conditions, such as size or sun aspect. And it works well to combine the two. For example, you could have a courtyard space in cottage garden style.
Here’s a list of the two types of garden style. Then we’ll go into more detail about each. Once you’ve found the style you like, there are lots of further resources so that you can put it into practice.
Classic garden styles
- Cottage garden style
- Traditional garden style
- Formal garden style
- English Country Garden
- Reflecting the architecture of your house
- Outdoor room, also known as urban garden style
- Contemporary/modern garden style
- Mediterranean or ‘dry’ garden style
- Coastal garden
- Exotic or ‘tropical jungle’ garden
- Wildlife garden
- Japanese garden
Garden style based on a theme, philosophy or garden conditions
- Naturalistic or prairie garden
- Eco-friendly garden
- Upcycled or recycled garden
- Plant lover’s garden
- City or courtyard garden
- Rock, mountain or alpine garden
- Woodland garden
- Native plants garden
- Rustic garden
- Edible garden (potager/food forest)
Cottage garden style
Cottage garden is an easy, pretty, relaxed style. It’s all about the plants and flowers that grow well in your area. It’s colourful and it’s great for small gardens.
This cottage garden belongs to Sue Oriel who grows flowers to sell in the rest of her garden. Her company, Country Lane Flowers takes orders and also sells from a roadside stall in Kent, ME13 9QR.
The key elements of cottage garden style is lots of flowers, often mixed with grow-your-own veg and a fruit tree. Add in somewhere to sit, read or work. Garden furniture in a cottage garden doesn’t need to match. And there isn’t a particular style of chair, table or bench. It’s just whatever you’ve managed to acquire.
As cottage gardens are often small, they have no lawn, just paths, a courtyard and lots of flowers. But it’s a style that refuses to obey rules. So you can have lots of what you love in your garden.
There’s more about cottage garden style and how to achieve it here.
Even if you don’t live in a cottage and have a very different climate to the UK, you can still adapt cottage garden style to your own garden. Bill Bampton of the Diggers Club, Australia, calls this ‘cottage garden mashup’ here and explains how to do it.
The cottage garden mashup – cottage garden style using your own local plants.
You can achieve cottage garden style even on a tight budget. There are more ideas on how to save money on garden design here.
Traditional gardens
Traditional and formal gardens aren’t quite the same, but they’re both structured. Even if they are small or middle-sized, they’re usually divided into ‘garden rooms’ with hedges, walls or trellis, each with its own style or function. The practical parts of the garden – for example, veg growing – will be separate from flower growing.
Traditional gardens will have a lawn, a herbaceous border or borders. They are filled with perennials and annuals, with plants planted in three, fives and sevens, or in swathes. Colour schemes and plant combinations are often quite carefully planned.
They’ll also have trees, shrubs, paths, terraces, a focal point – such as sculpture or a sundial – plus sheds or a greenhouse. I particularly liked the traditional garden at the Bath Priory Hotel when I visited in the autumn.
I would describe the Middlesized Garden as a ‘traditional garden’ because it has a formal parterre near the house, an open lawn at the back and a separate veg growing area out of sight of the house.
You could argue that ‘traditional garden’ isn’t a garden style, because it overlaps with ‘formal garden’ and ‘English country garden.’
Formal garden style
A traditional garden may well have a formal garden as one of its garden rooms. Formal gardens are geometric and structure. They are descended from the great gardens of Europe, such as Versailles.
A formal pond, steps and topiary at Doddington Place Gardens, Kent.
You’ll see topiary, mazes and knot gardens in formal gardens, along with statues or sculpture. That all sounds very grand, but formality can work very well in a small space, too. Versailles might have dozens of topiary-lined avenues. A small town garden might just have one topiary-lined path. The best book on Creating Small Formal Gardens is by Roy Strong.
The formal sunk garden at The Bath Priory Hotel., with its raised rectangular pond and geometric topiary shapes.
Some gardens have formal elements in them. Rob and Diane Perry have created a formal use of repetition in their garden with simple topiary shapes. This gives them great winter structure.
A very stylish and contemporary formal use of box and pittosporum in a beautiful Kent garden.
And this beautiful garden in the Kent countryside makes a great use of formal elements to frame a Georgian house. The structure comes from an elegant use of box and yew, both very popular for formal gardens. And as box now has a tendency to suffer from box blight and box tree caterpillar, this garden also showcases some excellent alternatives to box for topiary.
Some contemporary town gardens have a formal structure to them, so formal doesn’t have to mean historic. It’s about geometry and balance.
‘Charleston garden by Sadie May Stowell at RHS Hampton Court. Charleston gardens are considered to be a formal style of their own – based on classic elements, such as a central fountain, symmetrical paths and hedging or classical statue,
English country garden
English country garden style combines elements of traditional and formal garden style. It has evolved from grand or large gardens, but adapts to a middle-sized framework very well. I asked a number of experts, such as the editor of the English Garden magazine and head gardeners in English country gardens, for their definition of English country garden style.
English country style includes traditional benches and garden furniture, beautiful old brickwork and roses tumbling over an arch at Doddington Place Gardens.
They said that even if you have a small garden, ‘English country’ means wide paths and deep herbaceous borders, topiary and shrubs for winter interest, a lawn or lawns, traditional garden furniture, roses, urns, a sundial and trellis. Find out more about what they say in English country garden style – what it is and how to achieve it.
Even if you have a small garden, you can create an English country feel with deep herbaceous borders filled with perennials, such as delphiniums and lupins.
A garden style that reflects the architecture of your house
A garden design that echoes the style of your house is a harmonious look.
It’s unlikely that you’ll want to make your planting echo the style of your house, because we have so many more plants available now than we used to. If you limited yourself to Victorian plantings because you live in a Victorian house, then you’ll feel quite limited.
But it works very well to start with the architecture of your house when you’re thinking about hard landscaping. If, for example, you have a yellow brick house, you can use yellow brick for the paths. Or if your house is Edwardian, use Edwardian garden furniture.
This house and garden were both designed by the famous Edwardian architect Edwin Lutyens. He also designed the famous Lutyens garden bench, which suits the house perfectly.
A brilliant example of a garden that echoes the architecture of the house is the garden at The Salutation, a former hotel. Both house and garden were designed by the famous architect Edwin Lutyens. You can see the paths are of the same brick. And Lutyens designed a famous garden bench, which can be seen all over the garden. If, for example, you live in a 1960s house, you could focus on mid century modern garden furniture styles.
And writer Francine Raymond echoes her house in her garden design in a contemporary way. She bases her garden colour theme on the yellow brick and grey slate of her house walls and roof. She even paints the furniture and pots in this signature yellow and grey, which makes mis-matched furniture and chain store pots look stylish. See Francine’s garden style tips here.
A garden can also echo the town it’s in. This ‘garden with a sense of place’ reflects the house’s history and that of Margate, as well as its owner’s tastes.
If your house seems to lack a particular style, Polly Wilkinson of Pollyanna Wilkinson Garden Design recommends linking materials and colours between inside and out. For example, if the kitchen opens onto the garden, link the kitchen floor and the outdoor hard landscaping materials in some way.
The ‘outdoor room’ – urban garden style
The garden as an outdoor room has become very popular for small gardens in towns and cities. This puts hard landscaping and garden furniture at the front of the list, although many outdoor room gardens also have good planting.
The garden as an outdoor room. This one by Martyn Wilson at BBC Gardeners World Live has a fireplace/stove and an uplifting colour scheme.
For example, you can double up raised beds and seating, as designer Charlotte Rowe does in her own garden. The broad white stone edges to her raised beds are just the right height for guests to perch on for a party. She also has a fireplace and bench seating that doubles up as storage. Every inch of space is used beautifully. See Charlotte’s 12 tips for a creative urban garden here.
Think about outdoor kitchens, gyms and even outdoor showers. Here are tips for creating an outdoor kitchen from The Frustrated Gardener blogger, Dan Cooper. Dan is a passionate plant lover and his courtyard garden is crammed with exotic plants, which shows that you can have lots of wonderful plants and a garden room you can live in.
Contemporary or modern garden style
If you like contemporary design in your home, then you’ll probably enjoy it in your garden too. Contemporary garden design has come to mean an innovative use of materials – such as corten steel and gabions. These are combined with geometric or assymetrical squares, circles and rectangles. Ponds, paths, pergolas and pots are also geometric.
Contemporary garden styles have an innovative use of materials, such as the slate used in the top photo of Andy Sturgeon’s Best in Show garden at RHS Chelsea 2019. The photo below it is of gabions, which were originally for heavy duty landscaping.
Contemporary garden planting is carefully planned and controlled. In a small garden, a top garden designer may work with a palette of only 12-20 different plants, but they will be carefully chosen. There may be lush foliage, but you won’t see the riot of colour that you’d expect in a cottage garden. The flower colour scheme may be based on green and white, or it may feature just one or two colours.
You can see contemporary garden design at the garden shows. Not every show garden is a contemporary design, but you’ll see a good range. The RHS Chelsea Flower is the top international garden show for innovative garden design. Even if you can’t visit it, check out the coverage.
See here for a contemporary garden that uses gabions and modern furniture.
And see The Garden Design Details That Make A Town Garden Feel Bigger & More Beautiful for a contemporary town garden designed by Charlotte Rowe Garden Design.
Mediterranean or ‘dry’ garden style
If you live in an area of low rainfall, then a ‘dry’ garden is an excellent choice. These can be called ‘Mediterranean gardens’, ‘Australian gardens’ or ‘desert gardens.’ The plants are at the heart of this style. Look for drought tolerant and drought resistant plants. These include succulents, cacti and several ornamental grasses. Good dry garden perennials and herbs include rosemary, lavender and verbascum.
Dry or desert garden style starts with drought-resistant plantings. No lawns though, because they need watering.
There’s more in this post about how to create a dry garden, based on advice from the Beth Chatto Gardens in Essex. Although annual rainfall is only around 20″ a year, Beth Chatto created a garden that never needed watering.
A dry garden will usually have a gravel mulch, which helps stop the earth from drying out. It also allows plants to spread and self-seed easily, although the flip side of that is that it needs regular weeding. But you’ve saved all that time by not watering!
Dry or desert gardens also have pots and sculpture. But they don’t always have specific paths, as plants grow directly out of the rock and gravel. For more inspiration see this beautiful private Australian garden with some dry planting. Or see 7 garden design ideas from four private gardens for an Australian sculpture garden.
And don’t miss The Sand Garden – A Bold New Trend in Resilient Garden Design.
Warning! If you live in an area of heavy rainfall, this is not the look for you.
A coastal garden theme
This is very similar to a dry garden. You need drought-tolerant plants which also withstand windy conditions. If you live directly on the sea, you’ll need plants that can cope with salt spray, too. But if you live a few streets back, that’s unlikely to be a problem. Find out which plants are good for a coastal garden here.
In a coastal garden, you’ll also plant into gravel, shingle or sand. Wooden decking is good for this look. The coastal garden look doesn’t have a lawn.
Beach garden style features wind or drought-resistant planting and recycled furniture and ornaments.
And garden furniture and ornaments often have a seaside theme. Or they’ll be recycled or upcycled ‘found’ objects or made of driftwood. Almost anything can wash up on a beach, battered and faded, to be re-used in a coastal garden.
I live near Whitstable, on the Kent coast. Whitstable has some delightful seaside gardens. See them here in how to create a delightful seaside garden.
Exotic ‘jungle’ garden style
This is another garden style which puts plants at its heart. Think tree ferns, banana palms, brilliant colours and large leaves, planted densely. There are a surprising number of tropical-looking plants which do well in cooler, temperate climates. But some of the plants, such as cannas, dahlias and palms, may need special care in the winter.
Philip Oostenbrink is Head Gardener at Walmer Castle, where he’s creating a jungle-style garden in the moat. And he also has a small jungle garden behind his own house, so it’s a style that works well in both small and big gardens. Read Philip’s advice on creating a jungle garden here.
Go for brightly coloured flowers and plants with exciting leaf shapes and colours in an exotic garden. This look relies on lots of plants and layering.
Award-winning head gardener, Steven Edney and his partner Lou Dowle have a tropical garden in their own Kent home. Steve says that it’s a style that ‘needs a greenhouse’ because some of the plants are tender.
Crowd your plants up, using every inch of planting space you have. Exotic gardens have paths and a seating area, sheltered from the sun by trees. But forget about lawns.
See this post on how to create a brilliant exotic garden in a cool climate.
A wildlife garden
This doesn’t have to be a garden style as such. A traditional or formal garden can be very wildlife friendly, if the gardeners don’t use chemicals. When I visited Paul and Frances Moskovits’s garden with its amazing herbaceous border, I was almost deafened by the birdsong. And Frances says that the birds and frogs clean up slugs and snails for her.
Wildlife gardens can be any style. They need food, water and shelter, plus no or a very low use of chemical sprays.
Most of the gardens I’ve featured on the Middlesized Garden are very wildlife-friendly, such as the rose garden at Hever Castle, the amazingly beautiful English country gardens at Gravetye Manor Hotel and the Beth Chatto gardens. Yet they’re all very different styles of garden.
But if you want to put wildlife and the environment first above everything, then it’s essential to provide food, water and shelter.
Choose pollinator friendly planting and plants that have seeds and berries. You need at least one source of water and some shelter. This can be as simple as leaving piles of leaves and garden clippings in corners. Or you can make or buy bug hotels, bat boxes and bird boxes.
It’s also important to minimise your use of chemicals and to look after your soil. In this post, award winning garden designer Fern Alder explains that there are more living organisms and micro-organisms in one teaspoon of soil than there are people on earth. So one of her top wildlife friendly tips is to add garden compost, well rotted manure or another mulch to your soil at least once a year. This feeds those micro-organisms and helps keep your soil healthy and alive.
There’s a post here on what a wildlife garden really needs.
And if you don’t think you can create a wildlife garden behind a terraced town house, read A Small Wildlife Garden in Town.
A Japanese garden
Japanese garden style is about balance. It’s a carefully curated vision of the natural world. Instead of a riot of colour, there are carefully planned features, often balanced with empty space so that you can appreciate them. Instead of several trees or shrubs, a Japanese garden may have just one or two beautifully pruned specimens.
Kazuyuki Ishihara is a Japanese garden designer who has won many awards at RHS Chelsea Flower Show. Japanese garden design is carefully thought out, with beautiful pruning and a use of texture through mosses, stone and lichens.
Ikebana or Japanese flower arranging also impacts on planting in gardens. It’s an asymmetrical triangle. You plant or arrange flowers based on the three principles of heaven, earth and humanity. A tall plant reaches up to heaven, a low growing one covers the earth and in between there is the plant that represents humanity. Beth Chatto used ikebana as a basis for her dry garden planting.
Correct pruning is another big feature of Japanese gardens.
And there’s an interesting use of materials, such as moss. The key is to use a simple colour palette, with contrasting shades of green and perhaps just one signature colour, such as red, white or pink.
Texture is important in a Japanese garden too. If stones or garden ornaments age with lichens, leave them. Don’t scrub them off. The patina of age is part of the garden experience. (Although do scrub off anything slippery underfoot!)
Japanese gardens also have water features, such as ponds and waterfalls. These, too, will be carefully designed and balanced within the garden as a whole.
There’ll be an Asian theme to sheds, pergolas and garden furniture, too, of course. But you can’t create a ‘Japanese garden’ simply by filling a Western garden with Japanese or Asian themed furniture and objects.
Find out more in Monty Don’s book Japanese gardens – a journey. His thoughtful and knowledgeable commentary is always illuminating. Note that links to Amazon are affiliate, which means that I may get a small fee if you buy, but it won’t affect the price you pay.
Naturalistic or prairie garden style
This has been one of the most revolutionary garden style ideas of recent years. It started with Piet Oudolf and has been used in big public landscapes, such as the New York high line or the Hauser & Wirth gallery in Somerset.
Now it’s influencing smaller gardens. I talked to garden designer, Michael McCoy in a naturalistic planting style garden he designed in around three quarters of an acre. He also has it in his own garden, in a much smaller area.
You can also see the style at Marchants Hardy Plants in Sussex in The Best Time to Plant Perennials.
And at RHS Wisley in Surrey, the RHS has recently asked Oudolf to re-design his famous borders, now known as the Oudolf Landscape. The thinking behind it is fascinating – for example, the use of a curving path on a hill to immerse people more fully in the garden. See 5 Lessons in Planting Style from the New Oudolf Borders at Wisley.
Naturalistic planting means choosing plants that grow well in your area, then planting them in large blocks with lots of repetition. There are usually lots of ornamental grasses, too. You probably won’t have a lawn, just paths winding through the planting.
Naturalistic planting in three quarters of an acre, designed by Michael McCoy (top). The pic below it shows the garden at Marchants Hardy Plants in Sussex, which also majors on resilient perennials, planted in blocks, interspersed with ornamental grasses.
Foliage contrast and plant shape are key to this look, rather than an emphasis on flower colour. However, the big blocks of planting do have a strong colour impact, too. So it’s a different approach to the traditional herbaceous border, but it uses many of the same plants.
Naturalistic or prairie style is about the planting. There’s relatively little hard landscaping and you can choose whatever furniture style you like. But it’s a good backdrop for contemporary garden furniture. You can position this in a natural-looking clearing.
Eco-friendly garden
The eco-friendly garden overlaps with several other garden style ideas. If you’re after an eco-friendly garden, you may recycle or upcycle garden furniture, you may use native plants and you may aim for a wildlife friendly garden (one of the garden styles in the first Garden Styles post).
The eco-friendly garden puts all this together. The main emphasis is the use of resources, such as water, the carbon footprint of hard landscaping and choosing plants that help absorb pollution. In some ways it’s more of a philosophy than a style.
Two completely contrasting types of eco-friendly garden style. The top pic shows the Eco-City show garden by Hay-Joung Hwang for RHS Chelsea and below it is the wildlife friendly small town garden designed by a student doing an environmental science degree.
The eco-friendly garden can be quite relaxed and wildlife friendly, like Anne Vincent’s charming small wildlife garden, which uses rainwater run-off from the house’s guttering to create a pond and a bog garden. It was designed by her son while he was doing a degree in environmental science.
Or the eco-friendly garden can be quite high tech, with irrigation systems and automation. The Eco-city garden at RHS Chelsea a few years, for example, included a green roof, feeding plants through aquaponics and solar energy to power lighting. It also majored on plants that are particularly good at absorbing pollution. It was very much an ‘outdoor room’ but the choice of plants maximised its effectiveness.
There was a lot of moss between pavers, for example. Twelve square metres of moss (the size of a small lawn) absorbs more carbon dioxide than 275 mature trees. The technology and many of the plants could also be used in balcony gardening.
For eco-friendly hard landscaping tips, see Eco-Friendly Garden Design – What You Need to Know Before You Spend Money.
And for a few simple steps to upgrade the eco-friendliness of your garden, see 3 Very Simple Things to Do to Create an Eco-friendly Garden.
The upcycled or recycled garden
This look overlaps with the eco-friendly garden because re-using something is very eco-friendly. You’re not using up resources to make something new and not sending anything to landfill.
Generally the upcycled garden is the less smart end of the eco-friendly gardening, because there’s less reliance on technology. It’s based around re-using hard landscaping materials and furniture, often re-purposing them in interesting ways.
Two show gardens re-using hard landscaping and furniture. Top is the Old is Gold Garden by Anna Pawlowska with old doors used as fencing. Below it is Peter Cowell’s show garden made entirely with recycled elements, both for BBC Gardeners World Live.
For more inspiration, see 20+ creative, thrifty and recycled garden ideas.
There are also some good tips on finding and using recycled garden elements in Recycled Garden Ideas from RHS Chelsea 2024.
Plant lover’s garden
This is a style that evolves. It’s defined by lots of plants, often unusual or interesting ones.
All other elements of style are secondary, although they’re often delightful.
One of the best plant lovers’ gardens I know belongs to Stephen Ryan, a plant grower and broadcaster who is one half of The Horti-Culturalists YouTube channel.
Stephen’s passion is rare plants, which he grows for sale in his nursery, Dicksonia Rare Plants, near Melbourne. His own garden is a jungle of interesting specimens, interspersed with paths, seating areas, a pond and practical working areas, placed where they naturally need to be.
Stephen and his partner Craig unified the architecture of the house and the design of the garden by using the garden sheds as a blueprint for the house. It’s an unusual switch from making your sheds tie in with your house architecture. You can read more about it in Don’t Hide an Ugly Shed!
Stephen Ryan’s plant lover’s garden is a jungle of plants but the house and shed are tied together visually by the use of colour and materials.
If plants are your passion, then you’ll always want to put them where they grow best. That trumps having a particular ‘style’ but Stephen’s garden shows you can still have a charming and cohesive look.
City or courtyard garden
This category was suggested to me by one of the comments on my original 12 Garden Styles video on YouTube. My first instinct was to say that this term defines a space rather than a style. You could have a contemporary city garden, for example, or a cottage-garden inspired city garden.
However, I think it does deserve a category of its own because it is a very small space. You will only have a few elements and each one will be very visible.
You can either have a smart contemporary garden this one designed by Charlotte Rowe (top) or a cottage garden style like this one designed by Jane Scott Moncrieff.
One of the Middlesized Garden’s most popular posts is Why a Small Garden Needs a Big Idea. A small garden needs a big idea because it stops it looking cluttered. So if you’ve got a city or courtyard garden, you’ll need to think about garden style ideas in order to pick one that works.
Rock, mountain or alpine garden
People who live in mountain areas have specific practical issues, such as how to plant on a slope. It’s difficult to have lawn in a sloping garden, and plants may need to be extra resilient to cope with drought or wind.
And there’s always something special about a garden reflects the feel of the countryside around it. Commenters on my YouTube channel have said that ‘South African mountain garden’ or ‘Rocky Mountain garden’ are well known garden styles in their own country.
But even if you have no natural mountains around you, any slope (large or small) gives you a chance to create a rock garden. Rock gardens became very popular in the UK in the Edwardian age, so I interviewed Amicia Oldfield of Doddington Place Gardens about their Edwardian rock garden, rock garden style and how to adapt it to smaller gardens.
Key points include choosing local stone, if you can, because it will look more natural.
Visit some of the great Edwardian rock gardens to get inspiration for your own rock or alpine garden, like this one at Doddington Place Gardens.
It’s also important to pick drought tolerant plants because water drains down a hill and is less likely to stay held in the soil. However, that does mean that your rock garden will withstand drought without being watered, once it’s established.
It’s worth looking for alpine plants, which come from mountainous regions. (They don’t just come from the Alps in Switzerland!). These plants are often small or low growing, with vivid jewel coloured flowers.
Woodland garden style
‘Woodland garden’ was one of the most popular garden style ideas suggested in the comments to my garden style video. I hadn’t originally included it, because I felt that ‘woodland’ was more likely to be a part of a garden rather than the whole space. Even in a small town garden you may have two or three trees at the end, which create a woodland area.
However, woodland gardens are becoming increasingly popular. Trees are so valuable to wildlife and they improve air quality.
Woodland gardens are usually associated with grand gardens such as the top pic of Leonardslee Gardens in Surrey. But the pic below it is of the show garden designed for RHS Chelsea by the Duchess of Cambridge, Andree Davis and Adam White
A woodland garden probably won’t have a lawn as grass struggles to thrive in shade. But you will have paths and seating areas (like a clearing in the woods!). Curves probably work better than straight lines.
The other element of a woodland garden is layers. The trees are the top layer, then there are shrubs below that and ground cover at the bottom.
The shrubs and grounds cover need to be shade-loving plants. If your trees lose their leaves in the winter, then your garden may be sunny in spring, so you will be able to grow sun-lovers in spring. Find out about the different types of shade here.
If you already have trees, it’s usually best to leave them because a mature tree is hugely valuable to wildlife and the environment. If you’re planting trees, plant native trees if you can.
Native plants garden
Once again, this isn’t a specific style. A native plants garden in Australia would look very different to one in New England – or even old England.
It’s also possible to plant mainly native plants into any garden style. For example, Bill Bampton plants as many native Australian plants as he can into the English cottage garden mash-up style garden at The Diggers Club, Heronswood.
However, I think it does come under the heading of ‘garden style ideas’ because when you are choosing the plants, you’ll probably think more about the environment in which they grow. It’s a starting point for a garden that reflects your local landscape. You may also think about using local hard landscaping materials and traditional garden furniture.
Here in the UK, we have less awareness of native plants than in some other places. In British towns and cities, more than 80% of our garden plants are likely to be non-native. We have had thousands of years of trade and migration with Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Indigenous wildlife – up to a point – have adapted. However, our wildlife is also very endangered, mainly by loss of habitat through building.
Even if you don’t necessarily want a ‘native plants’ garden, it’s a good idea to discover which plants are native to your area and to plant as many as possible.
A native plants garden can be almost any style, but you may want to take inspiration from your local landscape and architecture.
Rustic garden
This is another of the garden style ideas suggested by Middlesized Garden YouTube viewers. It was defined as a ‘Western( as in cowboy) garden with large old trees and rusting farm equipment’ used as ornaments.
The equivalent in the UK could have chestnut hurdle fences and recycled agricultural equipment. It’s a variation on the upcycled style, but with a country theme.
I saw a garden around a renovated barn, which qualifies as a very elegant version of this look. (See this post on two very different kinds of country garden.) They used corten steel to symbolise the rusting farm equipment. They also planted rows of lavender and nepeta to echo the idea of a row of crops.
The top photo shows the very stylish garden belonging to garden writer Francine Raymond. She re-uses agricultural troughs and other equipment. The photo below it shows rustic chestnut hurdles.
Edible garden/potager/food forest
Once again, food growing didn’t make the original list of garden styles, because this is usually part of a garden rather than a whole garden in itself.
But an increasing number of gardeners are now mixing food and flower growing, planting food crops in ornamental borders and flowers with the vegetables. It helps to encourage pollinators.
There are also a surprising number of ornamental flowers which are edible. Day lilies are widely used in Chinese cookery. Dahlia tubers can be roasted. There’s more about edible day lilies here and you can find out more about edible flowers here. The important thing is to make sure you know what you’re eating and that you know it’s safe. Day lilies (grown from a rhizome) can be eaten. Ordinary lilies (grown from a bulb) are toxic.
A food forest is a low-maintenance, sustainable way of growing food and other useful plants, based on fruits and nuts from trees, vines and perennial food plants. It aims to mimic the growing patterns found in nature rather than those of traditional farming.
Gardens that combine food growing and flowers include the Abbey Physic Garden in Faversham and the show garden designed by Lucy Hutchings of She Grows Veg for Hampton Court Garden Festival.
Does the shape of your garden affect which style you choose?
In my opinion, you can have any of these styles in any shaped garden. But you may need to interpret them differently. See this wide shallow garden transformation for ideas for wide gardens. And see design tips for a long narrow garden here.
If your garden is unusually small, see why a successful small garden needs a big idea here.
How to choose the right garden furniture for your style
Firstly, don’t put style first. The key to choosing the right garden furniture is to first decide whether it will be protected from the weather in winter. If not, you need to choose hard-wearing materials, such as plastic, metal or stone/stone-composite. See how to choose garden furniture here.
Bonus garden style suggestions
Read this post if you want to save money on garden design!
Here are 10 more garden style ideas plus 7 garden design ideas from private gardens.
If your garden is sloping, then a rock garden can be a stunning option.
Shop my favourite garden tools, products and books
I’m often asked for recommendations so I’ve put together lists of the gardening books, tools and products that I use, or which have been recommended to me, on the Middlesized Garden Amazon store. For example, there’s a list of essential garden tools and also of my favourite books on gardening.
See more of these garden style ideas in video
You can see more examples, and more of each example in the Garden Style Ideas video.
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I love this, especially the woodland style garden. I think my garden is a blend of a few of these!