Discover Top Ten Garden Trends for 2017!
If you have a garden and want to make it looks luxurious and interesting, check out Top Ten Garden Trends for 2017 and get inspired by the latest garden ideas!
Natural Materials
After years of minimalist dominance in hardscaping materials, furniture, and decor, designers are noticing renewed interest in natural materials and a less geometric style. Garden designers suggest the use of tactile materials like wood and stone for the built elements of a garden.
Color Blocking
A trend in women’s fashion, color blocking is the use of discrete blocks of colors, and it’s making a splash in outdoor living spaces too. It’s about framing or highlighting a specific plant or area. A flash of color on a wall, for instance, can frame a row of potted plants or be the artful backdrop to an outdoor sofa. And if you don’t have a wall to paint, you can always use a solid-color outdoor rug or porch curtains to create the effect.
Hyperlocalism
“Locally sourced” continues to be a buzzword in many industries, and garden designers too are seeing interest not just in native plants but endemic plants—those native to a very particular ecosystem. These aren’t always readily available in the nursery trade, so you can transplant existing plants where you can. Such hyperlocalism is part of what has been called a celebration of regionalism. Using native plants and locally sourced materials has been popular for years. Add local rules for impervious coverage, chemical runoff, and storm-water retention, and you have the basis for intense regional, even local, design qualities.
Lawn Reimagined
Long a symbol of the American dream, the expansive and neatly manicured lawn continues to take a hit, due in part to drought, water shortages, and concerns about the environmental impact of fertilizing, pest-control treatments, and other traditional maintenance. Lawn-like alternatives, however, are hot, such as grass mixes that don’t need to be mowed, like Habiturf [a native turfgrass blend for the Southwest], and also taller, prairie-type mixes.
Natural Dye Gardens
Backyard homesteading has been going strong for a while, and edible gardens, chicken coops, and beehives are ubiquitous even in urban neighborhoods. The latest addition to the grow-it-yourself movement is natural dye gardens: plants used to make dyes for coloring textiles, yarn, and clothing.
Old and New Mash-Up
Choosing one style and sticking doggedly to it, whether modern or traditional, is passé. Mixing old and new is a trend in interiors and architecture about to arrive in gardens. You can either put modern elements in a traditional garden or incorporate bold, traditional elements in a modern garden.
Active Play Spaces for All Ages
Playing out in the yard isn’t just for kids anymore, and even for kids it’s different. People don’t want places they have to weed. They want places where they can relax and play.
Dwarf Shrubs
American yards are shrinking as houses grow larger on ever-smaller lots. Along with less space for plants, designers are hearing ever more requests for gardens that require little day-to-day maintenance. Dwarf shrubs to the rescue! Shrubs are strong due to their low maintenance needs, and dwarf summer-blooming varieties are well suited to smaller gardens, like hydrangea ‘Bobo’ and ‘Little Quick Fire’. If you only need a 2-foot plant, why plant something that’ll grow to 4 feet and then spend the next 20 years clipping it? It’s all about plants that are the appropriate scale for the garden.
Haute Houseplants
Just as bell bottoms are reappearing on runways, a 1970s-style fascination with houseplants is back. Los Angeles designer and author Justina Blakeney’s hugely popular Instagram The Jungalow, for example, showcases rooms lush with potted greenery. Bringing nature inside is definitely a trend we are seeing very often.
Sustainability Tech
It’s incredible what we can do from our smartphones nowadays. Ongoing droughts in California and throughout the West have galvanized an embrace of low-water landscaping, and technology advancements in irrigation systems make it easier than ever to control how much water is delivered to plants. Smart controllers that use weather data to automatically determine correct irrigation amounts have been around for a while now. But the newest controllers like Hunter’s Hydrawise can be programmed and monitored from your phone. You can literally check on your irrigation system from your beach chair during your vacation! Some even include flow sensors that send a text alert if they detect a leak in the system and a portal so that your contractor can manage your irrigation remotely if you run into scheduling problems.
Check out also: Vão Arquitetura designed a boutique around a luxuriant indoor garden.
