How to design a beautiful garden for year round pleasure. Designing your garden to be beautiful not just in spring and summer but also in winter in the key to a successful year round garden. People love to use their garden and be outdoors as much as possible, so it makes sense to design your garden for year round use.
There are many factors involved when designing and building a garden, but the two main factors should be functionality and aesthetics. A garden should be designed to be used at all times of the year including winter. By creating spaces that revolve around the house and its uses, and using the sun’s winter and summer patterns to your advantage, this can be achieved.
A fully functional winter garden should make maximum use of the winter sun. This can be done by simply placing the garden in full sun, or more carefully and creatively with the use of deciduous trees such as Japanese Maples or Magnolias. Deciduous trees will help to define a space and create an intimate garden by framing the area, while allowing maximum sun to permeate. Paving a winter garden space also adds a reflective element to the garden, adding much needed solar warmth to the space. By creating a more enclosed space with the use of fencing or a green wall along the back of a garden, one can effectively eliminating any wind and ‘catching’ the sun, this creates a micro climate where the sun is ‘trapped’ in the space.
Despite popular opinion there are actually a plethora of plants, shrubs and trees that will flower during winter. Some examples of flowering trees include Magnolias, ornamental cherries and apples. The most impressive winter flowering shrubs are of course the Camellias. Include shrubs such as Daphne, Helleborus, Osmanthus (which incidentally are all scented) and the multitude of flowering bulbs and there you have a bright colourful winter garden.
Winter colour, and indeed year round colour, can also be achieve with the use of coloured foliage plants. For a more tropical style garden Cordylines, Ctenanthe, Gingers and Bromeliads can be used to get a colourful effect.
All these factors should be considered when accessing your garden design along with site analysis, structural needs and functionality of the landscape. Consider what you want from your garden and how you want to use to, this will help with the design process and getting the most out of your landscaped garden.