Contemporary Garden Design: 5 Ideas to Think About
When you design a garden landscape, you plan for investment for years to come. So, planning should be materialized months before to allow the greatest rewards afterward. Spring is a good time for homeowners to lay the seeds of their garden design planning ideas. By properly planning and executing your garden decoration now, you can extend the time you spend in the garden and enjoy the beauty to its fullest later. When taken to its logical conclusion, modern landscaping’s sleek materials and streamlined approach can appear cold and uninviting. The focus on creating a structured space and respecting unadorned materials in modern design, on the other hand, could create an environment that feels not only pleasant and welcoming but also customized and artful. But before you start the proceedings, glance at your garden, find out its position, direction, and outlook. This may greatly influence how you want to go about the execution later. Here are the 5 most essential concepts that you should consider while turning your garden into a contemporary one.
1. Plant with a Vision:
Many contemporary landscapes feature neatly arranged lines of stiff, sculptural plants, as though the architect decided to impose the building’s minimalist form on the exterior spaces. This planting style, on the other hand, seems to deny any connection to the natural world. You shouldn’t feel stuck with rigid, architectural plants. In a modern landscape, the hardscape is well-organized enough that you can go for a more natural planting style. In a modern landscape, the hardscape is well-organized enough that you can go for a more natural planting style. The color of the flowers adds a lot of warmth to the room, and it goes well with the color of the ornamental grasses. Perennials can look a little haphazard and unkempt, so you’ll want to use them sparingly, but they can soften a corner or a walkway. Plants with bold silhouettes have a clean appearance that complements the architecture. Use evergreen shrubs as punctuation along the way and at the end of each border. For larger fields, use small shrubs like box balls or massive evergreens. Fill in the gaps with flowering plants once you have this picture. A border with a depth of a metre or more is ideal since it allows you to place smaller plants in the front and taller plants in the back. Containers, on the other hand, have the most flexibility, allowing you to switch them around as required. When it comes to climbing plants, choose an evergreen like clematis for a stunning and colorful show. You should also consider planting investment plants, out-of-season plants, indestructible succulents for high impact & low maintenance, rambling climbers to create privacy, scented climbers to frame a walkway, etc. Try evergreen organic planting for year-round interest and towering wildflowers for the summer months.
Furthermore, the field where your garden meets your neighbor’s property or the countryside is an excellent place to use plants to establish wildlife amenities. Often think about how your garden design can affect wildlife. Plant bee-friendly plants and purchase bird feeders to hang on fences or from tree branches to support bees.
2. Add Warmth
In modern architecture, a sterile, barren appearance is a typical pitfall. A plain concrete patio is warmer than stamped and colored concrete that looks like flagstone. Oiled wood or weathered and rusted Cor-Ten steel add a lush, warm tone to the landscape, softening the harshness of contemporary materials like black, gray, and silver. A log burner adds energy, and the terracotta color complements the pots and the simple color scheme in this greenhouse.
The color and style of your paving, as well as how it’s laid, will give your garden a clear design direction. Consider something fresh and exciting like large-format porcelain paving instead of jet washing the old faded paving. Porcelain does not absorb water, so it takes less maintenance than conventional paving, resulting in less pressure washing and less effort over time. So, choose a decking that will add texture & warmth. You could pick wood-effect composite for no maintenance decking. Also, keep your lawn in shape by reducing its size. Another action you could resort to is adding apt furniture to your garden. Folding furniture, an L-shaped sofa, or bench seating can be good choices for that. If you have good space, go for a full table set, sun loungers, and day beds, or on-trend hanging chairs or swing seats.
3. Lighting
In contemporary garden design, having night lighting is a must for this is what makes your garden come alive. Cool-toned lighting has an eerie, unsettling effect, so avoid these. Standing lights, table lamps, candle lanterns, and draped bulb strings are only a few of the choices available. Don’t hesitate to use ground-level lighting to create an atmosphere. Solar lights can also be used to illuminate your garden trees and leaves. Adding the finishing touch to a seating or dining area, or highlighting beautiful planting spots and other areas of your outdoor space at night, well-placed lighting can fully transform your backyard or patio area.
4. Focal Point
One of the most fundamental concepts in garden design is to create a focal point. A good design has a single strong focal point that attracts the viewer’s attention while also filtering out the less relevant information. It may be anything from a modern planter to a waterfall or a piece of sculpture. If you have gravel, stone, cobblestone, or other types of the garden route, you can make it a focal point by adding container plants. You can mix and match both flowers and pots, or go for a bit of statement repetition, by lining them up in sequence to define the region. You may also use trees as focal points.
5. Varied Heights:
Changing the height of the landscape so that there are items of interest at each level is an essential and effective trick that people often overlook. Adding appeal to your garden borders by filling them with a variety of plants is a great way to do so. The important thing is to fill in all the holes so that no bare soil is visible.
So, here are the 5 ideas you could think about when starting your gardening operations. Make sure you give enough attention to detail to each of these for it’s a long-term investment for you and your family. You can consult Dundrum Paving for your perfect garden services and solutions any time you want from any corner of Ireland.
