Garden Landscaping Style Guide: Choosing the Right Style for Your Space
Dan discusses landscaping style and offers tips on choosing the right style for your space.
TL;DR: Garden Landscaping Style Guide
Choosing the right garden landscaping style can completely transform how your outdoor space looks, feels, and functions. From classic cottage gardens to contemporary designs and wildlife-friendly spaces, this guide explores popular garden landscaping styles and explains how to choose the best one for your home. Drawing on real-world experience designing and building gardens across Somerset, SilverBirch Gardens shares practical advice to help you match your garden style to your space, lifestyle, and surroundings — and create a garden that works beautifully year-round.
Why Garden Landscaping Style Matters
Landscaping your garden is all about making your outdoor spaces feel safer, more practical and more inviting. Safe and practical means easily accessible with appropriate features that have been built or installed to high standards. Inviting however, is more about styling. A well styled garden is aesthetically pleasing and simply begs you to go outside and enjoy it.
Landscaping style covers such things as straight lines or curves, the relative proportions of hard surfaces to plants, the colours, textures and materials used and the way your outdoor spaces compliment your property.
It’s not just the outside of your property that should influence garden landscaping style – it’s the interior too. Creating a seamless transition from indoors to outdoors and back again, is a sure fire way to ensure that your garden becomes extra living space for your home. That way you’ll get best value out of your property, take more pride in it and, ultimately, all of that outdoor living will boost your wellbeing.
How to Choose the Right Garden Landscaping Style for Your Space
Garden landscaping style is, for the most part, a matter of personal preference, however it is strongly influenced by the amount of space you have, your budget, how you want to use the garden, and any intrinsic challenges with the plot (slopes, shade, external noise, nosy neighbours).
A sloping garden for example, can of course be built with a modern, minimalist style. But that may need extensive groundworks and levelling which will eat into your budget. A cottage style garden with winding paths and steps leading to a series of mini-gardens could be more cost effective. This is where the skills of a professional garden designer can help you to overcome garden challenges to get the outdoor space you dream of.
To help you find a garden landscaping style that you love, it pays to visit ‘open gardens’ and take photos of the features that appeal to you. That way you can start to assemble a mood board. Your garden centre will likely have a furniture showroom to inspire the styling. Whilst magazines such as Gardens Illustrated are stuffed full of ideas. If you have the time, a day spent at one of the RHS garden shows can also be enlightening.
Please don’t fall into the trap of forgetting to consider the age and style of your property when designing your new garden. Mirroring materials, shapes and proportions really is a really useful tool when creating a cohesive style. Sometimes a strongly contrasting garden style can work well (eg a cottage garden for a brand new eco-home). But do seek the advice of a professional garden designer before committing to a garden style that may confuse the overall aesthetic of your home.
Cottage Garden Style: Informal, Colourful and Timeless
Somerset is well known for it’s cottage gardens. They’re particularly popular for front gardens where they look beautiful alongside natural stone buildings. Cottage gardens bring colour and vibrancy to whole neighbourhoods and truly benefit local wildlife.
Done well, a cottage garden is less work than you may imagine. Dense planting is incredibly good at hiding weeds. In fact the Victorians would only pluck weeds out of their borders when they spotted them poking out above the flowers.
A typical cottage garden lends itself well to curving paths, natural stone hard landscaped features, and timber pergolas.
If you love to feel as though you are immersed in nature, a cottage garden may well be for you.
Contemporary Garden Landscaping: Clean Lines and Modern Materials
Many of our clients like the idea of contemporary garden styling. Typically we’re looking at open plan outdoor living with straight lines, clear views across the garden, strong architectural shapes and plenty of room for entertaining.
This style requires rigorous attention to detail with things like precise spacing between pavers, well-finished edges and perfectly spaced features. If you are leaning towards contemporary garden landscaping, it’s crucial that you hire an experienced landscaper to bring your design to life. This is not the type of project for a first-timer!
Traditional English Garden Style: Structured and Elegant
There’s a reason that tradition English garden style has never gone out of fashion – it suits every kind of lifestyle.
A typical “English” garden has a lawn for picnicking, playing, great drainage and to pull the design together. There will likely be trees for shade, privacy, and possibly fruit. Shrubs help soften the borders of the garden and to provide year round interest. A patio offers space for al-fresco dining, whilst a second seating area makes for a restful retreat.
This garden landscaping style is ideal for period properties and suits front gardens and back gardens alike. Symmetry is important and traditional materials such as stone and timber tend to be used in the build.
Maintaining a traditional English garden generally involves a little knowledge of lawn care and a willingness to do a little pruning weeding from time to time (depending on your planting scheme). However, if you love the idea of having a garden that compliments your property, has universal appeal and looks fantastic all year round, consider something based on traditional English garden style.
Wildlife-Friendly & Naturalistic Garden Landscaping
Wildlife friendly gardens are becoming increasingly popular and I must say I’m very comfortable with this. For without our amazing eco-systems, the joys of living in Somerset would be very much depleted.
With thoughtful garden design, people and wildlife can very much live in harmony. Think wonderful seating areas surrounded by wildflower meadows. Pergolas draped with climbing plants (especially scented ones!), sheds with living roofs, pretty ponds, intriguing nooks and crannies – there’s always something to look at in a wildlife-friendly garden.
Again, the styling needs to be sympathetic to the property and to the surrounding area. Sadly many people have been derided for rewinding their front gardens because neighbours perceive it as being unkempt. That needn’t be the case though, a carefully designed layout with well thought out plant choices can create a wild haven that is an absolute delight.
If you are someone who loves watching the wildlife through your window, wants your children and grandchildren to appreciate nature and enjoys the feel-good factor of knowing you are boosting biodiversity – than a wildlife-friendly garden is definitely for you.
Blending Landscaping Styles for a Personal Garden Design
The joy of working with a garden designer, is that they can guide you towards blending landscaping styles to create a space that is totally unique to you. That’s exactly what we do here at SilverBirch Gardens. We NEVER use a design template, rather we listen to your wish list and find a way to mirror your taste within the constraints of the space and the budget that’s available to you.
We want your garden to flow seamlessly in a way that feels comfortable for you. That might mean using cottage garden style planting between the zones of a contemporary style garden. Or it might mean combining traditional local materials with tropical style planting. The design process is all about creating a space that is unique to you.
Garden Landscaping Style in Practice: Designing Gardens Across Somerset
Check out our portfolio of work to discover how SilverBirch Gardens takes a bespoke approach to garden design and build. We celebrate the geology, people, traditions and culture of Somerset but in a 21st century way. If you would like to bring the SilverBirch touch to your garden, please do get in touch to arrange a consultation.
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