Choosing Your Landscape Design Style
An important decision to make before starting your new landscape project is selecting a landscape design style that best matches the look and feel of your home and still reflects your unique personality. This is the best way to create unity between your home and garden.
Below are samples of various landscape design styles you can consider.
Formal Garden Style:
A formal garden style emphasizes order, balance, and symmetry, featuring structured layouts with bold geometric shapes, manicured hedges, and topiary. Key elements include straight paths, repetitive patterns in plantings, a limited color palette, and architectural plants like evergreens, often incorporating a central focal point such as a water feature or statue to create a sophisticated, elegant, and calming space.
Informal Garden Style:
An informal garden design style emphasizes a natural, relaxed, and organic feel by using flowing, curvilinear lines, asymmetry, and mixed plantings to create a less structured, more whimsical atmosphere. Key features include meandering pathways, abundant and diverse plants that encourage wildlife, and a design that allows for natural plant growth rather than tight, formal control. This style is adaptable, often seen in cottage gardens, and prioritizes a natural aesthetic with lower maintenance needs compared to formal designs.
Tuscan Garden Style:
Tuscan garden design creates a rustic Italian ambiance through natural materials like stone and terracotta, Mediterranean plants such as olive trees and lavender, and a warm, earthy color palette of yellows, reds, and greens. Key elements include stone or gravel pathways, potted plants, pergolas for shade, and a slightly wild, informal style that embraces natural forms.
Mediterranean Garden Style:
A Mediterranean garden design style is defined by drought-tolerant, aromatic plants like lavender and rosemary, combined with classic features such as terracotta pots, gravel paths, and stone walls to create a warm, rustic, and drought-resistant landscape perfect for outdoor living. Key elements include shaded seating areas, ornamental trees like olive and cypress, structural topiary, and earthy color palettes, all emphasizing a relaxed, informal, and low-maintenance design that is sustainable and encourages outdoor entertaining.
English Garden Style:
An English garden design style is romantic and nostalgic, characterized by lush, naturalistic planting, abundant flowers like roses and foxgloves, and informal layouts that create a relaxed atmosphere. Key features include wide herbaceous borders, naturalistic grass paths, stone or brick paths, and features like arbors, trellises, and topiary. The style emphasizes a sense of history and a connection to nature, prioritizing a lived-in, classic, and sometimes vintage feel over strict formality.
Tropical Garden Style:
A tropical garden design style creates a dense, layered, and lush jungle-like environment through plants with large, vibrant leaves and bright, flamboyant flowers, such as palms, ferns, bananas, and Birds of Paradise. Key elements include planting in layers, using a mix of textures and colors, creating strong architectural shapes with plants like Cordylines and Agaves, and adding decorative elements with bright colors and natural materials. This style emphasizes a sense of density, mimicking a natural rainforest canopy and understory, and can incorporate hardscaping like curved planting beds or up-lighting to enhance the exotic atmosphere.
Asian Garden Style:
Asian garden design focuses on creating a sense of harmony and balance with nature, often employing a minimalist aesthetic with symbolic elements like rocks, water, and plants to evoke tranquility and spirituality. Key principles include asymmetry, naturalness, simplicity, and borrowed scenery, using carefully arranged natural materials and textures to create a meditative space that reflects the natural landscape rather than imposing on it.
Contemporary Garden Style:
A contemporary garden design style is characterized by clean, geometric lines, minimalism, and the harmonious integration of modern, man-made materials like concrete, metal, and glass with greenery. Key features include structured layouts with distinct zones, bold architectural plants, integrated hardscaping, and a focus on simplicity, functionality, and creating a tranquil outdoor space that complements modern architecture.
Desert Garden Style:
A desert garden design style, also known as xeriscaping, is a water-wise approach that emphasizes drought-tolerant plants like cacti, succulents, and native wildflowers, paired with hardscaping elements such as gravel, sand, and rocks. Key features include an earthy color palette, low-maintenance plants, sustainable water use, and an earthy, minimalist aesthetic that reflects the natural beauty of arid climates. This style is practical for modern homeowners in dry regions, offering significant savings on water and maintenance while enhancing a property’s value.