Bringing an Appreciation of Nature Home With a Garden

Few things are more satisfying than a well-designed and beautifully maintained backyard garden. With the right Kubota lawn equipment and plenty of imagination, anyone can create a themed garden that brings all the best parts of the natural world to the family’s back door.

How to Create Beautiful Themed Gardens

Themed gardens use outdoor design best practices to create well-integrated spaces where perennial and annual plants, wildlife, hardscaping elements, and human visitors can comfortably coexist. They’re easy to develop even on a large scale with Kubota lawn equipment.

Some homeowners like to follow gardening trends. Others view landscape design as a creative outlet that lets them express their personalities, ideas, and aesthetics. Either way, choosing a theme before heading out to the local garden center is essential.

How to Design a French Formal Garden

French formal gardens have arguably the most structured themed garden designs. They are highly ordered, feature strict symmetry and neat, well-defined spaces, and tend to incorporate cool colors and stone hardscaping elements.

It’s best to start with the basic design structure already in place. Use Kubota lawn equipment to create geometric forms for pathways and introduce water features such as reflecting ponds. Hardscaping elements like iron benches, pergolas, and trellises are all appropriate.

The best plants to incorporate into this type of garden are easy-to-tame evergreens for creating topiaries and an overall color palette emphasizing green and white to maximize authenticity. Rows of lavender can add a nice touch of color.

Key Elements of an English Cottage Garden

In some ways, English cottage gardens are the polar opposite of French formal gardens. They offer far more design flexibility and can accommodate a broader range of plants and styles. The most critical design consideration is to keep things cozy.

An English cottage garden usually combines vegetables, flowers, and local perennial plants to create a low-maintenance, often highly edible, landscape. There’s no need for formal structure or geometrical shapes.

With a cottage garden, placing a vegetable bed among local wildflowers or an herb spiral is perfectly fine. When possible, go for curves instead of straight lines, and incorporate cozy hardscaping elements like bird baths and wooden benches.

Pollinator Gardens for a Healthier Ecosystem

A garden’s theme doesn’t have to be design-focused. Pollinator gardens are becoming increasingly popular worldwide as a way to create more holistic ecosystems that benefit nature and people.

Pollinator gardens should feature local wildflowers and perennial plants. Most garden designers incorporate multiple layers into pollinator gardens, including hanging baskets, climbing floral vines, and water features.

The plants chosen for a pollinator garden will vary based on the climate. Across the US, asters, echinacea, milkweed, bee balms, and butterfly weed are popular choices. When in doubt about which wildflowers to plant, check with the local extension office.

Using Kubota Lawn Equipment to Create Gardens in Arid Climates

Not everyone benefits from living in a perfect climate with a long growing season and plenty of water for plants. In arid climates, it’s best not to focus on lush plantings that require excessive water.

Homeowners can use Kubota lawn equipment to create a Japanese Zen garden, for example. These gardens consist primarily of sand and carefully chosen stones. Each element must be placed carefully to maximize its aesthetic impact, including plants such as bonsai and sedges.

Many of the design principles above can be combined or altered to fit the circumstances. Incorporate rain gardens into a cottage garden design in a dry area to take advantage of the temporary moisture, or add a tiny fairy container garden for kids that fits the overall theme.

There’s no wrong way to design a themed garden. Pick an overarching idea, rough in the beds, install the hardscaping elements, then head to the garden center and get planting.