Landscaping doesn’t have to be hard or expensive. There are plenty of smaller and easier ways to transform your garden into the ideal space. In today’s blog, here are five ways you can start designing your garden with ease.

Layering your flower beds

A really easy way to revamp your garden and create a theme, by seeing plants for their height and breadth, you can design flower beds that capture the attention, lead visitor’s eyes to certain places in the garden and produce areas that stand above the rest. Try our hydrangeas with their beautiful forms at the backs of your flower beds for maximum impact.

Shape and form in the garden

Shape and form are everywhere, yet – by taking advantage of the shape of a plant, and either complimenting it or contrasting it with others, you can create beautiful patterns, focal points and more in your garden.

Where you’re planning on planting roses, try adding in some beautiful soft grasses – not only will they add texture to your garden, they’ll soften the harsher foliage of shrubs and other plants. For maximum impact, we recommend adding two or three grasses in with every harder-shaped plant. You can find our grasses by the plant information hut. 

Laurels and box hedges will also bring attractive form to the borders and divides of your garden.

Keeping a consistent theme

When you’ve decided on how you’ll be layering your flower beds and you’ve looked at the kinds of shapes and forms you want to take advantage of, the next tip is to keep everything consistent. Whenever you visit a show garden, you’ll see the definite patterns emerge, they work together to create a beautiful design. By simply following those first two tips, you can create something close to this in your own garden.

Hardscaping

Alongside the natural elements of your garden, hardscaping with manmade materials will provide a garden with definition and beautiful contrasts. Try our premium sandstone paving slabs over your lawns, or grow conifers against our fencing, found at the top left corner of the garden centre. You’ll find large conifer stocks, located in the outdoor plants section.

Adding a water feature

Water features aren’t just for adding a sense of tranquillity to your garden, you can base your grand design around them, too. Like all hardscaping materials, you can produce a framework with which you can incorporate long grasses, wider-leaved hostas and alpine flowers. Shrubs like the Juniperus ‘Limeglow’, found at Almondsbury, would work perfectly planted around a water feature.