Designing Your Herb Garden

When it comes to designing your garden, your options are only limited by your sense of fun and imagination. If you lack space, an herb garden can be grown in a variety of containers or pots or by using what ground space is available, using interesting planting designs to provide the most growth.

It's much easier to care for herb gardens where all the plants are easy to reach. In addition, maintaining an herb garden should be relatively maintenance-free if you plan and choose your herbs and growing locations carefully.

There are several different approaches that many gardeners take when it comes to planting their herb garden. While some people design for the beauty of an herb garden and take advantage of the wide range of color combinations that are possible, other people plan their herb gardens for convenience or regular and constant use.

Growing For Looks

When designing an herb garden merely for aesthetics or for providing a splash of color in an otherwise dull landscape, many people choose to plant their herbs in patterns that will display vibrant color as they bloom, and at the same time blend in to the rest of the yard landscape.

When planning an herb garden for aesthetic visual pleasure, there are certain things that you need to take into consideration. First and foremost is the shape. Whether you decide to plant your herbs in a particular shape such as a square, a circle, or rectangle, the outside borders of your shape, should be obvious. Depending on the amount of space you have, such a design for an herb garden may be limited to a few square feet to a very large area that can provide an exciting and challenging growing project.

In order to keep all areas of your outside herb garden accessible, it is important to break up that design with some sort of surface that will allow you to walk into and among your herbs so that you can weed and thin as necessary as your plants grow. For example, many people use such objects as bricks, pea gravel, paving stones, or even wood chips or gravel to separate sections of an herb garden to allow a footpath for easier access.

When planning such an herb garden, you might want to design the layout according to color schemes, or even determined by the height of fully-grown plants. Sometimes herbs can look quite ragged looking when fully grown, but this does not mean that your herb garden needs to look like a patch of weeds.

Edgings can provide lovely borders for your herb garden. While many other people are fortunate enough to be able to surround their herb gardens with stones or fences or hedges, creating an illusion of depth and visual interest is possible, with careful planning and making use of color and height for those on more limited budgets as well. Many experienced herb gardeners have learned small tricks, like plant placement, to create stunning visual effects.

For example, some gardeners plan herbs placement according to those herbs that bloom in cooler colors, such as purple, blue's, common blue-greens, and dark greens situated in the rear of a garden. Then, by placing herbs that bloom yellow, green, orange, and red in the front will make your herb garden appear larger than it actually is. The size of fully-grown herbs can also be used as a gauge for a planting scheme. Any garden looks more symmetrical and balanced if larger plans are planted behind shorter plants.

In addition, the location of specific herbs within the herb garden area will help optimal growth. For example, planting an herb with large leaves in front of a low row of small leafed herbs will block sunlight and limit the growth of that smaller plant. Instead, plant smaller herbs in front of the larger herb plants so that they are able to receive plenty of sunlight through the growing season.