Gardening Design Ideas for Your Home

Edible Beauty

• Don't limit your vegetable garden to a summer patch that looks flat and dead during the winter. Combine fruits, herbs and vegetables with annual and perennial flowers, bulbs, shrubbery and trees to create a vibrant year-round space. Plant chamomile flowers near cauliflower to deter its most common pests. Birds attracted to a wall of berry bushes may leave newly planted seeds of corn to sprout undisturbed. Cosmos and asparagus make a handsome pair; asparagus produces delicate fronds in mid-to-late spring, while bright cosmos bloom above frothy greenery from summer to early autumn.

Classic, Low-Maintenance Grace

• A classic ornamental garden combines perennials, annuals, trees, shrubs and inanimate features such as benches, fountains and statuary. To create a low-maintenance version, choose only plantings have a reputation for being hassle-free. Finding the best plants for your geographical region requires a trip to the nursery, where staff can guide your selections. For an old home in the northeastern U.S with a small shady yard where you host family gatherings, include a yard for mingling, a border of shade-loving perennials such as heuchera and astilbe, vinca ground cover and pots of white impatiens near comfortable seating.

Center of Attention

• Maybe the hydrangea bushes you see all over the neighborhood don't speak to you, and you have zero interest in weeding, but you want to look out your window and be amused, delighted and intrigued. Make the focus of your garden a collection of objects. Folk artists sell works for outdoors including windmills welded from old car parts, fountains covered in mosaic tiles and animals carved from wood. For city spaces, use smaller-scale attractions. Indulge your obsession with plastic turtles or beautiful rocks. Any collection can enliven your outdoor space, with or without complementary living plantings.

Container Ease

• Small spaces and yards with difficult rocky, clay or contaminated soil can host astonishing vegetable, herb, flower and perennial gardens in containers. Even trees can thrive in pots. Consider the sizes and shapes of the containers as design features in and of themselves. Pair plants and pots that enhance one another. Combine tall, medium and trailing plant varieties in one pot. For instance, surround a hibiscus standard with purple coleus and a chartreuse sweet potato vine in a large, lightweight ochre-colored pot to make a festive anchor for a grouping of pots near a doorway.