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 Types of Garden;

 A Formal Garden

In the Western gardening tradition a formal garden is a neat and orderedly garden laid out in carefully planned geometric and symmetric lines. Lawns and hedges in a formal garden must always be kept neatly clipped.

Trees, shrubs, subshrubs and other foliage arealways carefully arranged, shaped and continually trimmed. A French garden or Garden à la française, is a specific kind of formal garden, laid out in the manner of André Le Nôtre; it is centered on the façade of a building, with radiating avenues and paths of gravel, lawns, parterres and pools (bassins) of reflective water enclosed in geometric shapes by stone coping, with fountains and sculpture.

The Garden à la française had its origins in sixteenth-century Italian gardens such as Boboli Gardens behind Palazzo Pitti, Florence, laid out by a series of architect-designers for the Grand Duchess Eleanor of Toledo. The formal parterre of clipped evergreens was transferred to France, where some of the earliest formal parterres were those laid out at Anet. Claude Mollet, the founder of a dynasty of nurserymen-designers that lasted deep into the 18th century, introduced the formal parterre.

In it's simplest form a formal garden would be a box-trimmed hedge lining or enclosing a carefully laid out flowerbed or garden bed of simple geometric shape, such as a knot garden. The most elaborate formal gardens contain pathways, statuary, fountains and beds on differing levels.

Formal gardens were a feature of the stately homes of England from the introduction of the parterre at Wilton House in the 1630s until such geometries were swept away by the naturalistic landscape gardens of the 1730s, but perhaps the best-known example of a formal garden of gravel, stone, water, turf and trees with sculpture is at Versailles, which is actually many different gardens, laid out by André Le Nôtre. In the early eighteenth century, the publication of Dezallier d'Argenville, La théorie et la pratique du jardinage (1709) was translated into English and German, and was the central document for the later formal gardens of Continental Europe.

Formal gardening in the French manner was reintroduced at the turn of the twentieth century: Beatrix Farrand's formal gardens at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington DC and Achille Duchêne's restored water parterre at Blenheim Palace are examples of the modern formal garden. New York City’s Central Park features a formal garden in the Conservatory Garden at the northern sector.

A Cottage Garden

A cottage garden uses an informal design, traditional materials, dense plantings, and a mixture of ornamental and edible plants. Cottage gardens go back many centuries, but their popularity grew in 1870s England in response to the more structured English estate gardens that used formal designs and massed colours of brilliant greenhouse annuals.

They are more casual by design, depending on grace and charm rather than grandeur and formal structure.

The earliest cottage gardens were far more practical than their modern descendants—with an emphasis on vegetables and herbs, along with some fruit trees, perhaps a beehive, and even livestock.

Flowers were used to fill any spaces in between. Over time, flowers became more dominant.[10] Modern day cottage gardens include countless regional and personal variations of the more traditional English cottage garden.

A Residential Garden

Not to be confused with home gardens.

A residential or domestic garden, is the most common form of garden and is generally found in proximity to a residence, such as the front or back garden. The front garden may be a formal and semi-public space and so subject to the constraints of convention and law. While typically found in the yard of the residence, a garden may also be established on a roof, in an atrium, on a balcony, in windowboxes, or on a patio.

Residential gardens are typically designed at human scale, as they are most often intended for private use. However, the garden of a great house, castle or a large estate may be larger than a public park in a village, and may produce foodstuffs as well.

Residential gardens may feature specialized gardens, such as those for exhibiting one particular type of plant, or special features, such as rockery or water features. They are also used for growing herbs and vegetables and are thus an important element of sustainability.

A Kitchen Garden (Potager)

The traditional kitchen garden, also known as a potager, is a seasonally used space separate from the rest of the residential garden - the ornamental plants and lawn areas. Most vegetable gardens are still miniature versions of old family farm plots with square or rectangular beds, but the kitchen garden is different not only in its history, but also its design.

The kitchen garden may be a landscape feature that can be the central feature of an ornamental, all-season landscape, but can be little more than a humble vegetable plot. It is a source of herbs, vegetables, fruits, and flowers, but it is also a structured garden space, a design based on repetitive geometric patterns.

The kitchen garden has year-round visual appeal and can incorporate permanent perennials or woody plantings around (or among) the annual plants.

A Shakespeare Garden

A Shakespeare garden is a themed garden that cultivates plants mentioned in the works of William Shakespeare. In English-speaking countries, particularly the United States, these are often public gardens associated with parks, universities, and Shakespeare festivals.

Shakespeare gardens are sites of cultural, educational, and romantic interest and can be locations for outdoor weddings.

Signs near the plants usually provide relevant quotations. A Shakespeare garden usually includes several dozen species, either in herbaceous profusion or in a geometric layout with boxwood dividers. Typical amenities are walkways and benches and a weather-resistant bust of Shakespeare.

Shakespeare gardens may accompany reproductions of Elizabethan architecture. Some Shakespeare gardens also grow species typical of the Elizabethan period but not mentioned in Shakespeare's plays or poetry

A Rock Garden.

A rock garden, also known as a rockery or an alpine garden, is a type of garden that features extensive use of rocks or stones, along with plants native to rocky or alpine environments.
Rock garden in Chandigarh, India.

Rock garden plants tend to be small, both because many of the species are naturally small, and so as not to cover up the rocks. They may be grown in troughs (containers), or in the ground. The plants will usually be types that prefer well-drained soil and less water.

The usual form of a rock garden is a pile of rocks, large and small, esthetically arranged, and with small gaps between, where the plants will be rooted. Some rock gardens incorporate bonsai.

Some rock gardens are designed and built to look like natural outcrops of bedrock. Stones are aligned to suggest a bedding plane and plants are often used to conceal the joints between the stones. This type of rockery was popular in Victorian times, often designed and built by professional landscape architects. The same approach is sometimes used in modern campus or commercial landscaping, but can also be applied in smaller private gardens.

There is a Japanese rock garden, referred to in the west often as Zen garden, is a special kind of rock garden with hardly any plants. The Rock Garden is a sculpture garden in Chandigarh, India. Spread over an area of forty-acre (160,000 m²), it is completely built of industrial & home waste and thrown-away items.

A Japanese Garden

Japanese gardens can be found at private homes, in neighborhood or city parks, and at historical landmarks such as Buddhist temples and old castles.

Some of the Japanese gardens most famous in the West, and within Japan as well, are dry gardens or rock gardens, karesansui. The tradition of the Tea masters has produced highly refined Japanese gardens of quite another style, evoking rural simplicity.

In Japanese culture, garden-making is a high art, intimately related to the linked arts of calligraphy and ink painting. Since the end of the 19th century, Japanese gardens have also been adapted to Western settings. Japanese gardens were developed under the influences of the distinctive and stylized Chinese gardens.

A Contemporary Garden

The contemporary style garden has become very popular in the UK in the last 10 years. This is partly due to the increase of modern housing with small gardens as well as the cultural shift towards contemporary design.

This style of garden can be defined by the use 'clean' design lines, with focus on hard landscaping materials: stone, hardwood, rendered walls. Planting style is bold but simple with the use of drifts of one or two plants that repeat throughout the design.

"I have never had so many good ideas day after day as when I worked in the garden." John Erskine:

"Let no one think that real gardening is a bucolic and meditative occupation. It is an insatiable passion, like everything else to which a man gives his heart."Karel Capek:

"Gardening is a kind of disease. It infects you, you cannot escape it.When you go visiting,your eyes rove about the garden; you interrupt the serious cocktail drinking because of an irresistible impulse to get up and pull a weed." Lewis Gannitt:

If you're intested in reading about garden design or Landscaping have a look at a sister site. There you will get some ideas and resources that may help you to lay out a new garden or improve what you already have.

The picture (right) is a snap of the first show from Mr A. Richards's pond in the UK. Thanks very much for this lovely contribution Mr Richards.....any more?

This photo (right) is sent in by a reader who claims it is his garden/yard. He said his name is Mr Ying Tong Chia and that he came here from China and brought everything you see piece by piece and re-assembled it all in his garden/yard.

Our spies tell us that in fact he runs the local Chinese take-away and is a bit of a joker. What some people will do for just a little bit of fame.