6 Trends for the Beautfiul Garden You’ve Always Wanted
Does your idea of garden style lean towards a garden gnome in the corner, or do you prefer a full, cascading waterfall as your garden ideal?
The garden trends for 2018 have something for every style and every budget. Stroll with us through the best of this year’s garden highlights, and start planning your look for this year!
Asian Influence
Meditation gardens, Zen gardens, and shinrin-yoka (forest bathing) are all shaping garden landscapes this year. The overall emphasis is on mindfulness, and you can achieve this by concentrating on drawing the eye toward a garden focal point, like a mirrored tower or reflecting pond. Place a bench or seating area in a quiet section of the yard to enjoy the tranquil view. Position the dancing display of a water accent to create an instant zen zone. For homes out in the country, a walking path through the woods leads you to reconnect with nature with a tranquil escape.
Bathroom Plants
This aesthetic trend extends your enjoyment of the outdoors year-round. The bathroom is a haven for humidity-seeking plants that will thrive wherever there is shower steam, and will add a soothing ambiance at the same time. Depending on the daylight your bathroom absorbs, look for plants that love humidity and prefer the light that will be available to them. Top picks include orchids, begonias, the peace lily, snake plant, air plants, lucky bamboo plants, and Chinese Evergreen.
Clean Air, Welcoming Home
Plants that refresh your home’s air do double duty, adding beauty while enhancing your living space. A perfect excuse to fill every room with layers of foliage! Look for dependable plants that thrive in low-light and don’t mind inevitable dry spells, such as the Peace Lily (these can be poisonous to small children, dogs and cats), Chinese Evergreen (Aglaonema), Snake Plant and Ficus.
Water Features
Photo: homeandgardenwisdom.com
This trend continues its reign, and for all the right reasons. Combining the soothing sound of running water, the visual interest of the natural flow, and a natural mirror to reflect your garden landscape, this trend is still a winner. Go from something as simple as a stand-alone fountain, to a larger reflection pond, to a yard-width flowing water feature. Up-cycled water features are also trending, taking advantages of objects such as galvanized metal stock tanks and other containers to add a whimsical frame to your feature.
Au Natural
Photo: ctvnews
Letting nature rule your garden can create a dynamic seasonal showcase of beauty, and reduces your garden work. Choose native plants that will self-seed and come back strong in coming years, such as trillium, datura, maximilian sunflowers, black-eyed Susan, fall aster, purple coneflower, milkweed and goldenrod. For a more civilized approach, loading on the cultivated plants so that they come in lush and too thick for weeds to take hold will result in an annual wall of color with a minimum of long-term effort. Try wisteria, purple hyssop, tulip and daffodils, hosta lilies, dead nettle, and lady’s mantle.
Succulents
These have been ruling the plant displays in stores all winter, and their enduring beauty will continue through the summer. Succulents love bright, hot areas and minimal water. They thrive in delightful fairy gardens, along sidewalks, and can be brought inside to brighten your winter interior. Hardy succulents that can survive our Ontario winters outdoors include sedum, sempervivum, jovibarba, orostachys, rosularia and saxifraga. Heat-loving varieties can be brought inside at summer’s end, and accent your rooms that boast sunny windows through the winter.