Landscape Design Trends Are Moving Toward Low-Maintenance, Individualized Outdoor Spaces
Designers and their clients are always creating new looks for gardens and yards. This year, we are seeing a number of favorite landscape design trends return as gardeners look toward the past for inspiration and consider how homeowners utilize their outdoor spaces.
Top landscape design trends this year include:
Personalized spaces
Cottage gardens
Maximalism
Double-duty landscaping
Native plants
Keep reading to learn more about these trends, then request a consultation with Meadowlark Landscape & Design when you’re ready to incorporate them into your yard.
Personalizing Outdoor Spaces
The old idea of the front porch is alive and well, but has moved to the backyard. One of the biggest landscape design trends involve homeowners fixing up their lawns and gardens to create a living space outside. People want to create a sanctuary for themselves that includes comfortable places to sit and relax, with benches and chairs with soft cushions and a canopy and lots of flowers.
There is also an increase in outdoor entertaining as well, with a grill or a pizza oven, firepit, lights, and dining tables.
Landscape design services to make the garden more comfortable and useful year-round.
Victorian-Style Cottage Gardens
Cottagecore, a romantic movement that harkens back to an idealized British rural life back in the old days, is still hugely popular this year, judging by the images on social media of countryside scenes and young women wearing peasant dresses. Now the lush Victorian cottage gardens of the olden times are making a comeback.
Nostalgic plants like antique roses, hollyhocks, lilacs, and other lavish flowers rub elbows with rugged native plants. An old-fashioned rose with a French name spilling over with large pink flowers and a knock-out fragrance is the epitome of romance, and might have a deep purple clematis twining among the thorns.
This also ties into a movement toward more relaxed, natural landscape design that requires less maintenance and manicuring, but more cheerful flowers - a lot of cheerful flowers. Cottage gardens are bursting at the seams with flowers.
Maximalist Look
Customers want more colorful and whimsical details in their hardscape materials, with lots of tones and textures so it looks fun, not messy. Landscape designs are less about what everybody else thinks is aesthetically pleasing and more about what you enjoy - and showcasing your own personal style.
Maximalist gardens go all-out, with nary a space left untouched. But the landscape design is still intentional and organized.
Mixing Edible Plants Into the Landscaping
As more people spend more time outside in these cozy spaces, they are also modifying their landscape designs to include vegetables and fruits.
After all, why separate the vegetable garden from the ornamentals? Berry bushes, apple trees, and other edible plants offer great benefits to your landscape design. Like ornamentals, they also provide color, interest, style, beauty. But do you know what else edible plants provide? Tasty snacks!
Gardeners are also mixing leafy greens and herbs in with their landscapes. Swiss chard and small red lettuces add bright colors to the garden. Kale provides a lovely sea-green color along with texture. Some pepper plants with multicolored peppers stay tidy and cute and offer splashes of bright red, yellow, and orange. Artichokes add a bold shape to the landscape.
This garden duality celebrates homesteading and the movement toward growing your own food, without compromising on landscape aesthetics.
Xeriscaping and Native Plants
An article on Pinterest Predicts said that online searches for the phrase “drought-tolerant landscape design” went up by 385 percent in 2022. As homeowners look for ways to cut water bills and spend less time on yard maintenance, many gardeners are following landscape design trends for low-water, low-maintenance lawns and gardens that will survive in Wichita’s climate.
Others are “re-wilding” their yard by planting native or climate-adapted plants. Native plants are great choices because they have survived in our location and climate for hundreds of years without being tended to or coddled - so it is safe to say that they will survive in your backyard.
Native plants also support pollinators, need less fertilizer, and support the growth of wildlife habitats. Wichita is home to many prairie plants that are tough as nails and beautiful, including blue indigo, pale purple coneflowers, liatris, Missouri evening primrose, columbine, coreopsis, and many others. The K-State Extension service offers a number of excellent resources for selecting and growing native plants in central Kansas.
Meadowlark Landscape & Design provides landscape design services to help you incorporate a better and stronger array of plants, shrubs, and trees to your home that can withstand drought and other challenges.
Meadowlark Provides Wichita with Expert Landscaping Consultation
It is definitely not easy to design a garden, especially when you factor in a bewildering array of plant species and all kinds of hardscape options.
Let our experts guide you through the process. Meadowlark Landscape & Design provides landscaping consultations, where we collaborate with you to learn more about your vision for landscape design and how you use your outdoor spaces. Then our team will design the landscape with your preferences and lifestyle in mind.
After you approve the design, our team gets to work on landscape installation so you will not have to shovel river rock or plant trees when the temperature is 95 degrees. We even provide maintenance for your yard and garden to keep everything looking sharp all year long.
Contact us so we can help you! Fill out the contact form on our website, or give us a call at (316) 880-0227. We hope to hear from you soon!