Gardens can connect us to the natural world in meaningful ways, whether we’re plucking the first ripe berries of the season or pausing to watch wild birds flit through foliage. While we most often talk about the nuts and bolts of landscape design — the shrubs, pathways and irrigation systems that make them work — let’s take a moment to explore the less tangible ways we can design our gardens to foster connection with nature.
1. Plant Something From Your Childhood
Gardens can be powerful places for connecting us to our roots. Perhaps you remember smelling a specific type of flower your grandmother grew, biting into an heirloom tomato or climbing among the branches of a certain type of tree. Try putting one or more of these nostalgic plants in your own garden as a way to honor that memory or loved one.
2. Engage the Senses
Scent is a powerful memory trigger. If there’s a fragrance you associate with a time period in your life or a loved one, adding this scent to your garden can bring you right back. If you don’t have something in particular you’d like to plant, you can’t go wrong with David Austin’s ‘Gertrude Jekyll’ rose, a pink shrub rose with a cabbage center and an old-fashioned rose fragrance.
Adding plants for texture, like fuzzy dusty miller (Jacobaea maritima,syn.Senecio cineraria), or for movement, like ornamental grasses that sway in the slightest breeze, is another way to engage the senses and make you feel more connected to a garden.
3. Slow Your Journey
Gardens are often places we go to wind down from the rush of everyday life. Think about ways you can set a garden up to help you slow down — perhaps by creating a meditation labyrinth or simply adding more bends and curves to garden paths. Using stepping stones, rather than a smooth paving material, can be a useful way of slowing your journey through a garden.
Ground covers grown between flagstones (like the woolly thyme pictured here) can also engage the senses with a tangy herbal smell if crushed. The velvety lamb’s ears (Stachys byzantina) planted on either side of the path seen here tempt one to bend down and touch the leaves.
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Source: Lauren Dunec Hoang – Houzz Contributor, Landscape Designer
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