by Nancy Bauer
2024 Trends in Garden Design:
Current trends in garden design can be summed up in two words ‘resilient & creative’.
Resiliency is required for gardeners & plants forced to work with unpredictable climate change.
Resiliency leads to creativity by embracing new concepts, thinking outside the box and adapting to a new normal.
Here are some Current Garden Design Trends for 2024:
- Enhancing Edimentals: ‘Edimentals’ are plants that are both edible and ornamental. Edimentals can be grown anywhere in the garden and be part of the living landscape. Kids love them! When sprinkled throughout the entire garden (versus in a dedicated vegetable bed), edimentals are a great way to draw kids out of the house and into the garden, encouraging them to forage while they wander.
- Exploring Naturalistic Planting: The emphasis is not on creating orderly plant collections but on creating a diversity of plants that will blend with nature. This involves experimenting with natives and nonnatives to create naturalistic plant communities, providing freedom from constant maintenance. It’s also a great feeling knowing you’re doing something good for the soil, the wildlife, and pollinating insects (which are at an all-time low).
- Rain Gardens: With drought becoming a regular occurrence in many regions, rain gardens have soared in popularity as a method to slow down the flow of rainwater and irrigation, to keep this water on site and out of storm sewers. Plants chosen for rain gardens need to handle the feast or famine amounts of water and include many natives, grasses, and sedges with their long deep root structures.
- Learning to Love Bugs: More people are tolerating bugs in their gardens, and letting go of the unsustainable concept that leaves need to remain intact at all times! So before reaching for the nearest pesticide they are considering some of the organic options.
- Adapting to Climate Change: Our gardens, like ourselves, need to adapt to weather rapidly becoming hotter/colder/wetter/drier, more than ever before. Innovative, plant cultivators, designers, and gardeners are focusing on creating and utilizing new plants that provide sustainable beauty and embrace this change.
- Embracing Gravel Gardens: A gravel Garden is a sustainable low water garden. It is a garden consisting of small gravel rather than soil, with carefully chosen plants. Some benefits of a gravel garden are, no soil = no weeds, less fertilizer, any less maintenance.