Theme Gardens - A Unique Take on Garden Design

No space is too small for a garden. In the City of New York, even the tiny triangles where streets intersect now become rain gardens, spaces designed to capture and drain rainwater and prevent it from flooding city streets. Plants in those places have to be hardy enough to live in dry conditions and yet survive brief periods of flooding during heavy rains. Usually there isn't much maintenance available, so plants have to be capable of living in their native conditions. Some plants require high maintenance, feeding, watering, pruning, winter cover and others, carefully selected, have been growing in the native conditions for countless years and can provide a beautiful garden without much time. When you start to design and plan a garden, there are some basics to consider. Will the garden be mostly in sun or shade? What kind of soil do you have? What  planting zone are you in? What's your average rainfall? Do you want to go native, or are you willing to throw in a few more exotic perennials?

Gardens can be designed to serve specific purposes. Here are some special kind of gardens you can create.

Fragrance Gardens - designed with plants that have strong scents. It's not only the blooming flowers,  like hyacinths, lily of the valley, or stock, which perfume an entire area in the spring. You can grow mint and crush it's leaves between your fingers for that spicy, minty, smell. A shrub such as lilac is another heavenly scent that can also be cut (another kind of garden - the cutting garden) and brought in your house. Lavender has long been used to make sachets for drawers and the scent is released by the passing breezes. Even grasses that release a pleasant scent when stepped on, such as thyme, can be part of the fragrance garden.

Butterfly Gardens - designed to attract butterflies by using plants which are fragrant and rich in the nectar that butterflies drink. Among other things, butterflies like marigolds, nasturtium, queen anne's lace, the tall, strong hollyhock, butterfly bush, coneflowers, the amazing smelling, velvety deep purple heliotrope and indian paintbrush.

White Gardens - White gardens, which are monochromatically white, are almost fluorescent in moonlight. All of those flowers which come in bright, intense colors, also, by their textures, smells and shapes, differentiate themselves among whites. The tall elegant delphinium, or Japanese iris, the mid garden scented phlox, short petunias or candytuft, the light airy baby's breath, the early spring daffodils, mixed with the green, gold and white of hosta leaves, or ferns create a breathtaking simplicity, yet combine to glow subtly in the colors of the setting sun. Don't forget the climbing clematis or roses, which can cover a wall, trellis or lamppost with a variety of flowers from white through the rainbow. A variation on the white garden might be the Gray Garden, not all gray plants, but a garden of more subtle blues and greens, the soft gray/green leaves of artemisia or globe thistle, rocks and evergreen ground covers. and softly waving grasses.

Children's Gardens - Children's gardens can be places of amazing wonder as they participate in the transformation of bare earth into edible things like pumpkins or gourds, tomatoes,  blueberries, strawberries, corn or fruit trees. Or they create a garden of flowers to cut and bring into the house as proof of their efforts. The mighty sunflower, growing to heights over 6 feet in a season and providing seeds for birds all fall and winter, are awe inspiring to children and adults alike. The Chinese lantern, with hollow red/orange fruits, which can be dried and preserved or sometimes dries to an incredibly fragile network, light as air. And one of my favorite the poignant, yet hardy, bleeding heart, whose pink or white hearted shaped flowers with their tiny teardrop dance on the wind in early spring.

Zen Gardens - it may be sparse on plants and contain only sand and rocks, artfully arranged, a bench, and a simple enclosure to make it a place of contemplation and meditation.

And lastly for this article, the Hummingbird garden. Hummingbirds crave sweet nectar and love the color red, so plants like trumpet vines, lupines, lilies, phlox and petunias can all be used to attract the tiny, every moving bird.

The author of this article is an architect, who currently works for the New York City Dept. of Parks and Recreation. Gardening and photography are among her most valued hobbies. Her software and website can be found at 3D Home Decorator, where you can design a garden of your own, and her renderings and architectural visualizations can be seen at Architectural Visualizations