Home » Plants & Animals » Virtual Gardening » Theme Gardens - Planning without the Pitfalls

Theme Gardens - Planning without the Pitfalls

© Carol Wallace

Another problem we encounter when trying to create theme gardens is the "collectors complex" - the one which makes us aspire to have ALL of the plants that fit a certain theme. Once again - many of those plants may simply languish in your garden's growing conditions.

So we have to learn a difficult lesson - just say no.

Having established these few ground rules, we can now go on to talk about different possible theme gardens that we can plant. I can name a few.

• One possibility is a Shakespeare garden. Remember Ophelia's mad scene? She hands out flowers with messages - "There's rosemary for you - that's for remembrance. . . - and many gardeners seek out those plants, as well as others that may grace the lines of the Bard's other plays.

• Another possibility is the bible garden. Many, many plants are mentioned in the bible, so you actually have some fairly wide choices. Of course if you consider the area in which the authors of the different books of the bible came from, you might anticipate that most of these plants are somewhat Mediterranean in origin. But there are many Mediterranean plants that do well in temperate climates as well.

• Geographic sorts of gardens such as Mediterranean or tropical can also be fun. If you don't live in the tropics, the latter can be pretty work-intensive as you dig up and haul in the tender plants every fall, struggle to keep them alive through winter and replant in spring. But there is also a "tropical look" garden, which has all the atmosphere of the real thing without the labor.

• Then there are romantic gardens. Roses are often associated with romance, and so a rose garden might do the trick - although you may want to be selective about which roses you choose. Somehow "Whiskey Mac" doesn't cut it. Or make your romantic message poignant with old fashioned flowers like Cupid's Dart and Love Lies Bleeding.

• Animal gardens are fun, especially for kids. You can use plants with animal names contained in them (tell your neighbors that all those dandeLIONs are a theme garden, if they don't mind!) Or plant cultivars of hardy plants that have animal names such as the "Happy Kitten" daylily I mentioned several paragraphs ago.

• Colors also create a theme, from the infamous all white garden to purple and black gardens. And I have seen other, somewhat ghoulish gardens, some morbid "poison" gardens, as well as the opposite kind - healing gardens.