Beautiful gardens appeal to our senses. Simple concepts can make a huge difference to the enjoyment of your garden space and particularly so, when it is a micro garden. Designers use these principles all over the world to make spaces really stand out and visually beautiful.
Add flowers or flowering plants
Splashes of colour break up green, provide variety, contrast and focal points. Try sowing both annuals and perennial flowers. e.g. cosmos, hydrangeas, sunflowers and marigolds.
You don’t specifically have to plant flowers though. A wide range of herbs and vegetables have beautiful flowers too. These include: chives (purple), spring onions (white), dill (yellow), thyme (pale pink to purple), basils (white or purple), pineapple sage (red), rosemary (purple), rocket (white), as well as all flowering vegetables and fruits.
Control weeds
Remove weeds before they go to seed. Compost plants that compete with what you really want in your garden. Why waste money by sharing your plant food and nutrients with freeloaders? Adding attractive and practical mulch will deter weeds from setting seed.
Group plants around a theme
Create a collection of plants with the same foliage or flower colour for greater impact. Theme an area of your garden by clever use of colour, it is an easy trick to use. Stand back and take a look at the colours in your garden now. Could you move them around for better effect?
Add some garden art
Garden art can be any ornament, collection, treasured find or something you make. When you add decorative items to your garden, it reflects your personality and adds character to your small space.
Use colourful pots or feature containers
Feature planters can help draw the eye to a focal plant or area. A planter with a splash of colour is a simple example of ‘less is more.’
By contrasting the size of the plants or pots you surround it with, you can create dominance with the pot you want to highlight as the key feature. Ensure the ones you put around it are smaller than the focal pot. This helps to create unity, as the eye focuses on the feature pot and then around the rest of the surrounding garden.
Use multi-functional edible herbs and flowers
Herbs provide fresh ingredients for the kitchen. Some have edible flowers. It makes attractive borders and pleasing aromas.
Choose herbs like curly leafed parsley, clumps of chives, mounds of lemon thyme and compact Greek basil with marigolds, violets and tatsoi. Not only do they provide variation in colour but add beauty, flavour and structure too.
Create unity and diversity
Achieve a beautiful garden by repeating a colour provided by a variety of different plants. Colour themes are a very effective design trick for adding beauty.
Beautiful gardens avoid clutter
This may be challenging if you have a really small space and want to grow a lot of plants! However, overcrowding will only make access difficult and the overall use of the space challenging.
Try to balance hard surfaces with the plants you select and avoid using too many different materials.
Consider growing some plants indoors and spread them out to areas of the home where they suit the light conditions. Ferns for example love the humidity and lower light conditions in many bathrooms whereas outdoors they may take up too much valuable personal space that could be better used for other plants or furniture.
Use vertical spaces like walls, railings, containers and hanging baskets to free up floor space on a small deck or balcony.
Choose Variegated Foliage
In some circumstances where you may have reduced sunlight, you may not have many options to grow flowering plants. You can still add colour and structure by choosing plants carefully. themicrogardener
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