Design Elements: Notes

Popular Garden Styles

Garden Style Elements

Japanese Garden

• water, symbolic of purity
• rocks, symbolic of strength and endurance
• island feature, symbolic of immortal and everlasting happiness
• a bridge, when colored red symbolizes luck and wealth
• stone lantern
• plants and mosses, like the pines which are symbolic of longevity and happiness; bamboo is similarly auspicious;the plum symbolic of vigor and patience
• teahouse or pavilion, embodying secluded quietness, stillness, and tranquility
• borrowed scenery
• raked gravel or sand, symbolic of water
• pathway or stepping stones, symbolic of a “way”

There are several specific styles within the Japanese tradition.

Did you know that fortune cookies originated in Japan as early as 1878? The first fortune cookies in the USA were served in the Japanese Tea Garden of SF, Calif.

English Garden
My page on English Garden Style delves into the elements of this style, please see the page for much more information on this style, “The English Garden Style”. Cottage gardens as we think of them are a branch of the English style garden, for more about the design elements and how to put together a Cottage garden, and the plants traditionally used, see “The Cottage Garden” and “Cottage Garden Plants”.

• Abundant planting
• Use of walls and barriers to create “rooms”
• Strong Garden “Bones”
• Skilled intermingling of flowers and foliage plants
• Intricate use of forms and color
• Often utilizing borders, sunken garden areas, and creating “natural” spaces within the design
• Even large garden spaces have a strongly personal feeling to them

Victorian Garden
This is a type of garden, strongly English and anchored within the reign of Queen Victoria, flourished during an age of plant exploration and collection. It fell out of favor in design circles when the great gardeners ofthe Arts and Crafts design movement advocated naturalistic gardens, of which these certainly were not. They are strongly connoted by the idea of “collecting” in much the same way the Victorians decorated their interiors, sometimes with curiosities and flights of fancy. There is a strong tradition of this style carried on in many venues simply because it strongly appeals to the senses. There is nothing quite like a pot of bright red geraniums… or rows of marigolds and red salvia to attract attention and create a pop of cheerfulness, whether you agree with the personal taste for it or not.

• using plants, often brightly colored annuals, in a “bedding out” scheme
• Specimen plants and specimen trees in the landscape
• Can use exuberant color combinations and plant forms, but can also be subtle.
• Love of ornament and features, such as grottoes
• Forms that mimic exotic places, like alpine gardens were popular
• Decorating porches with vines and containers of bright or unusual plants
• Collections were important
• Incorporated formality, sometimes with highly manipulated plant forms (vestiges of an earlier age, which the Victorians were enamored with i.e. romanticized Medieval estates)
• Complex rather than simple

If it weren’t rooted in plants and the good earth, Frederick Olmsted’s landscape ideas could be called “metaphysical”. An eye-opening read on concepts that shaped America’s sensibility of a garden, “Ten design lessons from Frederick Law Olmsted”

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