Intuitive and Aesthetic Evergreen Herb Garden Designs For Home Herb Gardens
Light up your dull life with some color. Green color being nature’s favorite color for the trees and forests, design and plan an evergreen herb garden with a ‘green and red’ or ‘green and yellow’ theme. Spring brings exuberance that peaks with the full bloom of the flowers and herbs. Summer heat urges plants in the ‘Theme Gardens’ to invite you to touch soft green textured leaves; get fresh, cool air and breathe exotic aromas from your home herb garden. Autumn’s shorter days bring the Nasturtiums into bloom and cover pepper plants with fiery red colored fruits. If you decide to have an evergreen herb garden at home the question arises how do you go about designing it. You can have your own themes like – Healing Garden, Culinary Garden, Fragrance Garden, Tea Herb Garden, Italian Herb garden and so on. The designs can be broadly based on the seasons or famous themes that are outlined below:
Potager Garden
A small vegetable or traditional kitchen garden in French is known as ‘Potager garden’. A Potager garden may contain edible and non-edible (scent, dye) herbs. Non edible plants like flowering blooms are used to enhance the garden’s beauty. A well designed and carefully planned Potager can provide culinary herbs, flowers and vegetables throughout the year in all seasons. The Potager garden need not be a miniature version of old farm plots but the design can vary with aesthetic landscaping, lawn areas and ornamental plants with flower blossoms. The kitchen garden may have a separate section of herbs and vegetables. A structured Potager garden can be designed with repetitive geometric patterns like circle, triangle and oblong shapes to give a year round visual appeal and a choice of perennials and annuals plantings.
Cottage garden
Cottage garden is nothing but a distinct and informal design with traditional plants, dense green foliage, ornamental and culinary herbs. They are also known as English gardens, the central theme of focus and attention for such gardens is the grace and charm rather than the grandeur and formal glamorous designs. Homely Cottage gardens go back to several centuries and are at present, reinvented in style with more structure and artistic creations. Traditional Cottage gardens had flowering plants like roses, hollyhocks, pansies, delphinium including bee-hives and livestock. The emphasis is on abundant greenery of vegetables and herbs along with fruit bearing trees. You can design a cottage herb garden on a sun-dial theme with curved paving paths lined with thymes and a rustic seat to relax.
Witches Garden
Witches Garden is a herb garden specifically designed and used for the cultivation of culinary and magical or medicinal herbs. For centuries, wise folks, women and monks after discovering the healing power of herbs started using them for treating minor and major ailments. During the medieval period, monks and nuns acquired this medical knowledge and grew the necessary medicinal herbs in gardens especially meant for healing. They were mistaken by the common people as witches or evil persons having super-natural powers and were condemned for centuries. There are plenty of medicinal herbs that you can aim for. All herbs including rosemary, sage, aloe vera, parsley, mint, henbane, marjoram, rue, angelica, basil have potent to heal.
If you are concerned about the empty and devoid look of your herb garden in winter, plant some candy-red branches of the red twig dogwoods and sedum that will stay green throughout the winter. Plant some creepers that will trail over the side of the window sill giving an enchanting and vivid look. Bamboo, ornamental grasses and flat leaf Italian parsley are three plants that are used profoundly by avid gardeners in winter season. While the above themes are indicative of the traditions and can be used for starting a herb garden there is always room for innovation, ‘mix and match’ while setting up a herb garden with a unique theme.
