Our Guide to Some Elegant Garden Design Ideas

A garden can be a great escape from life’s day to day chaos. However, there’s a caveat to this; your garden cannot be a study in chaos itself. A garden that strives for an elegant design won’t have this issue. It’s not that difficult of a concept to pull off, either. If you have plants, flowers, furniture, and other features properly placed and not in a state of disarray, you already have the bones for elegance firmly in place. Here are a few more ideas that you can deploy to further deepen this concept.

1. The Simplicity of Shrubs

If you’re keeping a garden, you’re probably going to festoon a decent chunk of it with some plants. If you’re not careful, this may end up getting out of hand, as you may be tempted to think that empty space equates to space that could be filled up with a vast array of plants of all shapes and sizes.

While it isn’t necessarily a bad idea to fill up space in your garden with plant life, the wrong set of plants will make your garden look too frazzled, leaving you with zero chance to create an elegant vibe. This is precisely why planting a few shrubs can be a key ally to help you achieve your quest of garden elegance.

The compact nature of shrubs naturally draws the eye because they create such an intensely concentrated visual. This is particularly the case if you get a flowering shrub, where you can enjoy the added bonus of color bursts popping from its stoic green surface area.

2. It’s Hip to be Square

There is a correlation that exists between straight lines and a calm, mind. A sight line that leads to edges and has no fluctuation tends to put the mind at ease, because it provides a logic progression of things for the eye to follow. This progression is a key component of creating elegance – things that make sense visually tend to offer up more refinement.

As such, an elegant garden is going to be loaded with straight lines, right angles, and non-circular geographic patterns that make sense in your brain. There’s no threat of disorder or potential clutter-fueled chaos present, mainly because everything looks the way it should be. This in turn helps add an extra measure of calmness.

What’s more, keeping things squared and angular presents a more formal ambiance to your garden. This vibe not only makes the garden feel extremely impressive, it can also inspire you to take better care of your garden. In an elegant garden marked by square angles, when something looks sloppy, it really looks sloppy.

3. Feature a Fountain

A fountain of any kind will add elegance to a backyard. The sight and sound of a stream of water bubbling, dripping, and splashing on rocks or a flat surface is something that’s immensely calm and soothing, particularly if it’s in a space in your garden where it can easily be seen from your typical vantage point.

The key to a good fountain is water movement. While a birdbath or a statue that allows for water inside a basin does look nice from afar, the fact that the wet stuff just sits in the basin essentially doing nothing doesn’t put forth the visual enticement of a fountain and its dancing liquids. Plus, stagnant water can get rather dirty, rather quickly.

That’s not to say that you need to wholly ignore cleaning your fountain. Like anything involving water, diligent cleaning is a must to keep the fountain looking as elegant as you want it to look. However, cleaning the fountain usually isn’t an arduous task, and can be easily integrated into your normal garden maintenance.

4. Get the Right Kind of Statue

Let’s say you don’t want to deal with the maintenance that comes with owning a water fountain, but you still want something that looks refined and attention drawing. If this describes your mindset, then a statue may be what you’re looking for. However, there are a few caveats to consider before you go down this route.

Firstly, not all statues are created equally. Certain statues, like recreations of famous sculptures, work very well to create the desired refined effect. A statue of a garden gnome or a couple turtles won’t – they’ll create a sense of whimsy instead.

Additionally, just as in the case with the water fountain, you need to make sure you’re going to put the statue in a spot in your garden where it can be easily admired. After all, if you can’t see it, what’s the point of having it in the first place?

5. Choose your Materials Carefully

Perhaps the trickiest part of keeping a garden elegant is making sure you consistently are bringing the right materials to the backyard. There are certain items that keep a refined, formal presence than others. Red brick and stone tile are two prime examples of items that seem to exude a sense of elegance.

If you introduce one element that seems out of step with an elegant garden, the refined motif will completely collapse. A weird color that sticks out, a radically curved shape, a statue that hasn’t been kept up properly – these are all things that could turn your garden from refined to quirky (not that there’s anything wrong with quirky, of course).

As this and the other tips demonstrate, you don’t fall into creating an elegant garden space without rhyme or reason. It takes careful planning, sourcing the right materials, and the fortitude that comes with needing to stay the course, no matter how cool that whimsy-looking garden gnome looks.

Your reward for sticking to your guns and not wavering from the path of refinement is a beautiful space that’s deliberately designed to make you forget about the stresses and displeasures of the day to day grind. And when you think about how chaotic life can be, wouldn’t it be great to have your own hideaway in your own backyard?

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