Sooner or later, all gardeners long to try something new, to experiment with new plants. A theme garden is the ideal way to expand your gardening horizons. The possibilites are endless and once you get started, you may find it hard to stop.
Experienced gardeners and beginners alike love theme gardens. For the experienced gardener they are a chance to experiment with harder to grow or exotic plants. A theme garden is a great way to add a spot of pizazz to a mature landscape. If you’ve grown tired of gardening because you always seem to be planting the same things a theme garden is the perfect solution to rekindle your love of gardening.
Theme gardens lend themselves to smaller places or even containers, allowing the novice gardener a way to ease into the hobby without feeling intimidated. Because theme gardens are narrowly focused, it makes plant selection much easier. Small theme gardens are wonderful projects for assisted living community groups and churches where people of many different abilities and lifestyles can come together over the tending of a garden.
Kids Theme Gardens
Take advantage of your kid’s natural affinity for playing in the dirt by introducing them to the joys of gardening. Kids really enjoy theme gardens, especially if you let them help come up with the theme and plant selection. Theme gardening can take the child back in time to experience the foods, flowers and lifestyles of specific historical eras. Gardening is a good way for a home schooling family to have fun and get in a summer living history lesson.
Alphabet
It isn’t difficult to find colorful and easy to grow plants for each of the letters of the alphabet, starting with alyssum and ending with zinnias. Before you get the kids started searching for the plants on the Internet, be sure you have a large enough place to grow 26 plants.
Animals
Kids have fun being silly and what could be sillier than plants named as animals? Encourage their creativeness with dandelion, tiger lily, monkey grass, cowslips, elephant ears, foxglove, catmint and the succulent hen and chicks.
Fairy Tales & Nursery Rhymes
Children’s literature is a rich source for the detective minded child. Challenge them to find the clues to various plants in their favorite stories and nursery rhymes. Here a few titles and the associated plants to get your child thinking:
- Jack in the Bean Stalk: beans (especially the giant varieties) are fun for kids to grow and they grow really fast
- Cinderella: pumpkins and gourds, especially the giant varieties
- Lavender Blue: herbs lavender and dill
- Mary, Mary Quite Contrary: silver bells (Canterbury bells)
- Peter Piper: peppers
- Peter, the pumpkin eater: pumpkins
Specific characters can be found in the garden too. Thumbelina, the Thumbelina variety zinnia and Tom Thumb, whose name has been given to both a miniature tomato and a popcorn variety.
Rainbows
Plant this one in an arch shape of 7 rows. Each row is devoted to a specific color of the rainbow. In order, the rainbow colors are red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet.
Colonial kitchen
A garden of herbs and vegetables common in our country’s first years is an opportunity to learn about food and history while having fun. A little research will provide you will lots to choose from like carrots, onion, garlic, corn, and beans. Flavorings of the era include the herbs sage, rosemary, parsley, and mint. The kitchen garden of the Colonial era was also the main source of the family’s dye for coloring their wool and their medicines, so don’t overlook the herbs of yarrow, calendula, nettle and flax.
Kids All Time Favorite Garden - Pizza Garden
Your child’s hands down favorite garden is likely to be the Pizza Garden. For additional fun, plant this one in a pizza wedge shape or round like a whole pie. With one exception, all of the basic pizza ingredients are easily grown at home. Wheat, for the dough, is the one plant that will be more of a challenge. It’s worth adding it to the garden plan just to give your child the complete sense of where his food comes from. If you are ambitious, you can pulverize some of the grains in a food processor or spice grinder to show how wheat becomes flour. You probably won’t have enough to actually make pizza dough but the kids will think it is cool to make a bit of flour! Everything else for a pizza is easy for kids to help plant and tend. The vegetables are onion, garlic, peppers, and tomato. Herbs include oregano, basil, and rosemary.
Popular Garden Themes for Anyone
Butterfly and hummingbird gardens are the most popular theme gardens; you probably already know many of the plants that attract the butterflies and hummingbirds. Both are attracted to brightly colored flowers, especially those that have a tubular flower shapes and sweet scented nectar like salvia and snapdragons. Other good choices are moss rose, petunia, honeysuckle, and the aptly named butterfly bush.
Kitchen Gardens
Kitchen gardens are essential to many gourmet chefs and food aficionados. Your first thought of a kitchen garden may be of herbs, but don’t overlook salad greens and vegetables.
French
A French culinary garden would include the components of traditional fines herbs: thyme, summer savory, marjoram, sage, and basil. Other French flavors include tarragon, dill, chives, watercress, and leeks.
Mediterranean
Italian and Greek flavors in a lichen garden include include vegetables such as tomato, onion, garlic, peppers and broccoli. The herb flavors you’ll need are parsley, basil, oregano, lemon balm, rosemary, marjoram, and fennel.
Salsa
With a few minor changes, the Mediterranean style garden becomes a Salsa garden. Skip the fennel and lemon balm, adding chili peppers, coriander, cumin, and cilantro.
Soup and Stew
The Soup garden can provide the basis for many wonderful fall seasonal soups and stews. Vegetables for this garden include onions, carrots, peppers, parsnips, rutabagas, beans, potatoes, and corn. For flavoring, bay, garlic, rosemary, summer savory, thyme, parsley, sage, cilantro and chives.
Native American
Another natural theme for a kitchen garden that has historical overtones is the Native American garden. Many of the plants will be the same as a Colonial garden and are also valued for their medicinal values. Commonly called the “ Three Sisters” corn, beans and squash are the foundation of this garden. Additional plants would include chives, wild lettuce, wild strawberries, sunflowers, echinacea, hyssop, sage, yarrow, and all varieties of mint.
Creative Idea Starters
Here are some additional theme ideas to jump-start your creativity and get you started on your own theme garden adventure. Most of the plants mentioned are readily available in a well-stocked garden center. You’ll find plants for the more challenging themes in specialty garden catalogs or by searching the Internet. There are many plant growers that specialize in theme gardening and older varieties or heritage plants.
Apothecary
Try your hand at growing the family’s medicine chest. You’ll find an enormous selection of herbs with medicinal values. Look for those whose Latin name ends with officinalis, which indicates its apothecary value. Don’t overlook the other valuable herbs that don’t have that designation. Among those are peppermint, chamomile, lavender, and mallow. The medicinal properties of herbs are well documented, but you do need to be aware of possible interactions with your prescription medicines. Consult your physician before ingesting herbs and prescriptions. Be cautious of information you find regarding herbs as medicines while surfing the Internet; unless the source of the information is scholarly or from a known authority, you may getting poor advice. Find information about processing herbs and dosages at your local library. Books from Rodale Press and by author Euell Gibbons are very reliable.
Celebrity or Names
Many varieties of roses, peony, day lilies, and iris are named after celebrities. Sarah Bernhardt peony is one that most gardeners know. Other flowering plants have more ordinary names such as johnny-jump-up and sweet William. You might also like to focus on the names of royalty, as in Queen Anne's lace.
Edible Flowers
Kids will love to eat flowers, but this one is really an adult project. Young children have trouble distinguishing between the edible flowers in Mom’s garden and all the other flowers in the world. Use your common sense with edible flowers and don’t eat ones that have mud on them or were sprayed with pesticides. Don’t pick flowers by the roadside to eat. They have been exposed to automobile exhaust and there are too many unknowns to make them safe to eat. Only eat the petals, not the stamens or pistils. Most importantly, do not eat any flower that you think is safe; only eat the ones you know for sure are okay to ingest. Among the edible flowers, the most common are garlic blossoms, chive blossoms, bachelor button, bee balm, burnet, calendula, carnation, chamomile, chrysanthemum, dandelion, day lily, geranium, honeysuckle, pansy, nasturtium, petunia, rose, snapdragon, sunflower and violets.
Native Species
Select only those plants indigenous to your region. Include your state flower. This type of garden often needs less tending because the plants have adapted themselves to your growing conditions.
Succulents
The entire range of succulents provide an amazing variety in stem shapes,colors and flowers. They are easy to grow indoors if you live in a colder climate. Succulents are often thought of as green only plants but many of them have colorful blooms. Good succulents to try are kalanchoe, aloe, mother of pearl, living rocks, and the delicate burrow’s tail.
Twilight
The perfect garden for a working family, the Twilight garden is designed to be enjoyed in the evening hours. Some flowers are even more fragrant in the evening. Think of silvery or white flowers that can reflect the moonlight such as moon flower, evening primrose, four o’clocks, dusty miller, and tuber rose. There are many varieties of night blooming day lilies.
Literary Gardens
Shakespearean
A classic is the Shakespearean garden. Shakespeare mentions more than 100 plants in his works, covering the entire spectrum from trees to flowers and herbs.
Biblical
Biblical gardens are another popular theme. There are vegetable, herbs, fruits, trees and all manner of plants mentioned in the Bible. You could focus on a particular book and grow only those plants or grow the common vegetables and fruits and then host a biblical feast.
Mythological
Mythology and folklore lends itself to a challenging theme garden. There are plants mentioned throughout classic myth and folklore, as well as all the names of gods and goddess to consider. Your challenge is in spotting the references and then hunting them down in the garden center.
Really Unusual Themes
Carnivorous and Poisonous
This is a specialty garden that you won’t find just everywhere. Many of the carnivorous plants are tropical and need the controlled growing conditions of an indoor garden. Many varieties of poisonous plant have interesting growing habits and that makes this an intriguing idea for a theme garden. Be sure to plant this garden away from the little ones and where family pets are not apt to discover it.
Natural Dyes
Many of the same plants from the Colonial garden are included in the natural dye garden. Virtually all the basic colors may be obtained from vegetation. The colors derived from plants have the softer look that is reflected in paintings of the era. Plants include beets, onion, carrots and many herbs.
Predator Insects
Experienced gardeners are always on the lookout for natural methods of pest control. This themed garden helps you out by inviting in the good bugs to feast on the bad bugs! Flowering plants with compact umbrella shape heads are a good to start with.
Postage Stamps
A natural if you have a stamp collector in the family is to use only those flowers that have appeared on postage stamps.
These are some of my favorite themes. Before you know it, you’ll be dreaming of themes that have special meaning to your family. Your kids will have a blast thinking of new gardens. No corner of your yard or empty windowsill will be safe! Happy Gardening.
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