Gardening is a fun activity that’s known to relax the mind and yield great benefits provided it’s done correctly. If you’ve decided to get down and dirty and start your own garden, you will first need to decide what kind of garden it’s going to be. Here’s a list of 7 types of gardens to help you decide which type you’d like to go for.
1. Container Gardening
Container gardening (also called pot gardening) is the practice of growing all kinds of plants, edible or otherwise, exclusive in containers instead directly planting them in the ground.
This type of gardening is a great way to reuse old containers in your home that would otherwise end up in landfill. Some examples of containers you can use include pots, boxes, tubs, baskets, tins, barrels, hanging baskets, tea cups or even egg cartons.
Container gardening is a great option if you haven’t got much space for a traditional garden with beds. Even if you do have a traditional garden, you can still have a container garden in a part of it. It adds versatility to gardens of all sizes and is fun to take care of.
2. Fruit, Vegetable and Herb Gardens
Having a fruit, vegetable or herb garden gives you the chance to enjoy fresh and healthy produce without any of the toxins you get from pesticides and so on that cause diseases. Backyard vegetable gardens are quite popular nowadays, with more and more people leaning into healthy lifestyle changes and sustainability.
This type of garden is very rewarding, since you get to enjoy delicious and healthy vegetables, fruits and herbs that you’ve grown all by yourself. What could be more satisfying than that!
3. Flower Gardens
Quite obviously, a flower garden is a plot of land in which flowers are grown and displayed. The purpose of a flower garden is to produce aromatic and visual enjoyment, providing the gardeners with a relaxing environment which they can care for and appreciate in their leisure time.
Unlike vegetable or herb gardens, a flower garden is created for less practical reasons. However, this doesn’t mean that they’re not important. They’re aesthetically pleasing and the flowers are great for pollinators like bees and butterflies.
Without pollination, plants won’t be able to bear fruit and produce seeds so the world would actually be in a lot of trouble.
4. Butterfly Gardens
Butterfly gardens are composed of plants that produce nectar as well as host plants which butterflies need for laying their eggs.
These gardens can be in any location, from large fields to small containers like flower pots or even window boxes. The purpose of a butterfly garden is to provide the butterflies with food and shelter for every stage their entire life cycle.
These gardens are extremely beautiful and one of the most popular types of gardens. If you want yours to be successful, you’ll need to have plants in it that would attract butterflies. Some examples of these plants are lavender, milkweed, hibiscus spp., marigolds, lilacs and purple coneflowers.
Butterfly gardens are a great way of creating a safe haven for butterflies and helping our environment in the long run.
5. Woodland Gardens
A woodland garden is the perfect type of garden to have if you’re someone who loves being with nature and would like to get lost in it.
These gardens can encompass a whole wood and are generally based around trees. This is why they’re shady and rely on plants that love shade. However, just because a garden is shady it doesn’t mean it’s a woodland garden. Most of the plants grown in woodland gardens are of native varieties. The most important feature about them is their combined canopies (simply known as layers of plants).
Woodland gardens require a lot of patience and commitment. Some plants take a few seasons to mature fully so it would take a few years for your garden to catch on. Therefore, if you’re not a patient person, you might want to give this a second thought.
Although it takes a lot of time for a successful woodland garden, the result is definitely worth the wait and the hard work.
6. Water Gardens
Water gardens (also called aqua gardens), are very popular since they make beautiful attractions to your outdoor space. Additionally, they’re also a great source of water for wildlife.
The primary purpose of a water garden is to display, house or propagate a specific variety of an aquatic plant. Although the main focus is on plants, they also sometimes house exotic and ornamental fish. If this is the case, the water feature would be a fish pond.
Water gardening is quite fun and involves growing plants that are adapted to ponds and pools. While the garden can be of any size or depth, its typically shallow and small (less than 20 inches in depth) because most aquatic plants are sensitive to depth and need a specific water depth in order to grow.
7. Hugelkultur Gardening
Hugelkutur is a gardening technique that was used hundreds of years ago in Germany. This technique of gardening is unique in comparison to other techniques. With Hugelkultur gardening, plants grow on a mound constructed from the debris of decaying wood like a raised bed.
Many people believe that this gardening technique improves the fertility of the soil as well as the water retention and soil warming. This is highly beneficial to plants that are growing or near the piles of rotting wood. Once the mounds are made, they’re left to rest for several months before any planting takes place.
Anything can be grown on these beds, but they decompose and release its nutrients too quickly. Therefore, more demanding crops should be planted in the first year such as pumpkins, tomatoes, cabbages, sweet corn and celery. Afterwards, the bed can be used for less demanding crops such as beans, strawberries and peas.
