Give Your Garden The Natural Look

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We’re all so busy trying to make our gardens more functional and useable. Or to keep it as tidy as possible, that it’s easy for it all to start looking a little artificial. Neatly kept grass, nice, clean patios, and carefully pruned greenery is all well and good, but it can feel like you’re sucking the soul out of your garden. If you feel like it has gone a little too far, here are a few ways to bring back the natural feeling.

Let The Wild In Your Garden

We all want a garden that we can get zen in. Somewhere we can relax and lose ourselves. However, if it’s a little too neat, or a little too manicured it can start to feel somewhat artificial. This doesn’t mean you have let your garden become overgrown and a nightmare to deal with. But you should consider buying some wildflower seeds. Whether you spread them through your lawn or decide to create a separate section for them, you can invite the feeling of an authentic meadow into your own home.

Make It More Suitable for Guests

When you think of wildlife in your garden, you might tend to think of pests such as mice, rats, and insects that will eat up all of your crops. However, the pesticide and other brutal means used to combat them can harm your local environment as well. What better way to make a garden feel authentic than to occasionally find a less destructive guest in it? Putting up a bird feeder, building a hedgehog house, erecting a bee hotel, or simply using companion plants that invite insects that prey on pests, such as ladybugs, can make your garden feel much more alive.

Add A Little Ruggedness

Taking the opportunity to add textures that feel more rugged and real can do a lot to make your garden feel a lot more characterful. For instance, instead of having a smoother option like stone tiles for your landscaping, you can instead choose paver sand. There are all kinds available, including smoother and coarser products, depending on what fits your needs. It’s a good way to create boundaries between, for instance, a walkway and a flower bed, but it doesn’t feel too artificial and it’s not too visually obstructive, either.

Try Softscaping

You’ve undoubtedly heard of landscaping and how it can help you create boundaries in your garden, ensure visual consistency, and lend a sense of presentation, rather than having it all be a slapdash mix of different elements. However, landscaping doesn’t always have to be hard stone walls and noticeable wooden fence posts. Besides using more natural materials like sand as mentioned above, softscaping involves the use of smaller and ornamental grasses. They can help maintain borders just as well but have a habit of overlapping them lightly, making it all feel a lot more authentic.

Grow “Up”

Vertical gardening has become the rage for a variety of reasons. It helps improve the privacy of the garden due to the sound-absorbing nature of plant life. It’s great for smaller gardens that don’t have as much horizontal space to grow with. It’s also much easier to maintain vertical gardens since they don’t run the risk of spreading over your lawn. Check out some vertical garden ideas to start adding a bit of green to your walls and fences. It will still look closed in, but at least it will have a much more natural aesthetic to it.

Keep Accessories Simple

You don’t have to get rid of your man-made objects entirely. However, if you want your garden to feel more naturalistic, you should keep things relatively simple. For instance, a water feature can be incredibly relaxing and evoke the feeling of a bubbling brook in the wild, but rather than a more ornate and complicated fountain, you could make it a simple birdbath with a shallow basin. Keeping it near some foliage offers the birds some appreciated coverage, while integrating it with the overall aesthetic of the garden, as well.

There’s nothing wrong with having a garden that feels a little wilder, just like there’s nothing wrong with a garden that’s prim, proper, and pruned. It’s all about what feels right to you. Hopefully, the tips above make it easier to achieve that if you want to add a dash more of the natural to your exterior with natural materials, more exuberant plants, and the like.