If cottage gardens with their falling vines and profusions of color put you off, an old-fashioned, formal garden design style may be your ideal setting. What is the definition of formal garden designs? It’s a meticulously manicured green park that exemplifies humanity’s dominance over nature. Formal garden designs include geometric shapes like squares and triangles, as well as straight lines, and focus on green, leafy plants rather than flowers. Formal garden design ideas may be used to fill a full backyard or merely to add an accent garden to a unique spot on the lawn.
What is the definition of a formal garden design?
You won’t be far off imagining famous manor homes in England and France in previous ages when you envisage a formal garden. The character of modern formal garden design style is derived from those principles and scaled down for the common household. Always start with a focal point, such as a fountain, a birdbath, or even a sundial, when designing a formal garden. Planting of foliage plants in beds and rows is done in a mirror image pattern. Formal garden designs have two sides, each of which is a mirror image of the other. Hedges are a popular technique to delineate routes and form geometric patterns, with boxwood shrubs being the most frequent species. Subtle clusters of foliage plants may be used to fill in the gaps in the borders and offer a splash of color.
Things to consider while recreating a formal garden design style
There are several things to consider while recreating formal garden designs, including aesthetic accents, size, landscaping, and planting.
- A formal garden design style exudes extravagance and a sense of well-kept refinement
Using huge, eye-catching objects like a classic urn or mirror, as well as the correct hedge to provide seclusion, may help convert a garden into a formal outdoor spot ideal for entertaining, wandering, and afternoon tea.
- The width of the center walkway can be narrowed as it recedes to make a tiny garden look larger
On a formal garden, size is important: even in a tiny plot, Lilliputian planting should be avoided since it might appear excessively fussy. If you don’t have enough space to include all you want, scale back your plans or design it as a part of a bigger garden. Formal planting has a sculptural character and serves as a backdrop for more delicate seasonal arrangements.
- When incorporating trees into a formal garden, they must be carefully picked
They should, in theory, be compact even as they mature, look excellent all year, and be easy to trim. Crab apple, quince (Cydonia not Chaenomeles), and hawthorn are all ideal and have flower and fruit, while the foliage of the weeping silver pear contrasts well with the dark evergreen yew. Existing trees can have their dominating influence increased by lifting the crown (removing lower branches).
Formal garden design ideas
Formal garden design ideas don’t just appear. They’ve been meticulously prepared in great detail. Formal garden design ideas may be used to fill a full backyard or merely to add an accent garden to a unique spot on the lawn.
- Begin by sketching out the shape of your lawn, or the area of your yard that you wish to convert to a formal garden design style, on a sheet of graph paper. As a starting point, place a focal point in the middle of the outline.
- Now it’s time to work on your boxwood hedges. Draw the pattern using mirror image techniques so that every section of the pattern corresponds to the side opposite the focal point.
- Fill in the gaps with gravel paths or other green plants like camellias or little fruit trees.
- To give your garden a formal feel, you don’t have to adhere to plain greens as your formal garden plants. Plant veggies in geometric forms, create concentric rings of colourful flowers around a fountain, or use triangular beds to grow herbs. You may add that formal garden flair as long as one side replicates the other and includes geometry.
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