Decorative gardens: The new trend of gardens in cities

Although the concept of gardens as such has not changed, the usefulness of gardens has evolved and so have the needs of the people who grow them, especially in cities. Nowadays, decorative or aesthetic gardens are one of the most popular types of urban gardens.

Can you decorate with a garden?

In most cases, the creation of a new garden no longer responds to the need for food for subsistence (although this is another added advantage that can contribute a grain of sand in the fight against the economic crisis of many households).

In addition to a healthy and natural diet, multiple social benefits, environmental education in cities or the improvement of sustainability, as detailed in the article Importance of Organic and Urban Agriculture, gardens are beginning to be used more and more as a tool aesthetics: garden decoration, use of the garden itself as a decorative element or as a multifunctional element (for example, vertical decorative gardens that separate several adjoining spaces while embellishing the environment).

Decorative gardens: union of architecture and agriculture

Due to the interest in the use of green spaces as an aesthetic tool, companies have emerged that are dedicated to the design, installation and maintenance of decorative gardens.

The orchards act in this case as architectural elements, in spaces where aesthetics is a fundamental aspect (hotels, restaurants, museums…), or in homes and private or community patios that users want to embellish.

The company AIR GARDEN designs and installs structures, mostly metallic, for the implementation of green areas or orchards on terraces, rooftops, gardens, or inside buildings. With the collaboration of architects, interior designers and professionals from agricultural companies, they have created orchards and vertical gardens, orchards on roofs of buildings (like the one that can be seen in the first photo), hanging orchards or green divisions between plots.

In the first image, an organic garden located on the roof of the Plaza de Abastos in Vitoria-Gasteiz. The image on the right corresponds to a vertical garden installed on the walls of the Betoño Industrial Estate, also in Vitoria .

On its website, in the PROJECTS section, we can find a lot of ideas to create very stylish orchards in our hotel establishment or in our own home or to solve, through them, problems derived from space, light, lack of aesthetics, acoustics etc.

Natural enclosure for the restaurant of Bodegas Dinastía Vivanco, in La Rioja.

The design of decorative orchards with style, some ideas

The first thing to create these multifunctional spaces and combine design and agriculture in our orchard with style is to define the available space and its shape: vertical space, rectangular, circular surface… Depending on this, some designs or others can be chosen.

Original containers or containers

We can use containers, like some of those that we have seen used by AIR GARDEN, or other containers or decorative drawers like the one in this image:

And if we are going to install the garden directly on the ground of our patio or garden, we can also help ourselves with wooden fences, stone borders, cement… or other structures that limit the space dedicated to the garden while highlighting the aesthetic aspect..

Recycled growing containers (Chelsea Flower Show)In the post Chelsea Flower Show: ideas for the garden, you will find other original ideas for containers for decorative gardens with a lot of style.

Designs with geometric figures

I have had in my hands a very interesting book that can give us endless ideas about the design of this type of orchard. It is called “Orchards with design”, by Benédicte Boudassou.It describes 20 projects on different types of orchards: aromatic paintings, vegetables, hanging orchards, circular plantations to condition the space that surrounds the fruit trees in our garden, etc.

It can be very useful since it not only provides the plan design of the new orchard with style, it also describes the materials needed for its construction, the recommended and compatible species to be grown together in the orchard, the difficulty of its realization and some advice. useful on location or how to mount it. You can also buy furniture to decorate the garden and make it more pleasant.

Source: B.Boudassou. Gardens with design.

Keyhole Gardens

I would not like to finish this article without mentioning the aesthetic utility of an agrarian construction that is gaining ground in some hot and dry areas of the USA, such as Texas, and that began to spread in Africa as a response to the lack of space and the need for a efficient subsistence farming for households: the Keyhole Gardens.