Softscape refers to the live horticultural elements of a landscape. Softscaping can include flowers, plants, shrubs, trees, flower beds, and duties like weed/nuisance management, grading, planting, mowing, trimming, aerating, spraying, and digging for everything from plants and shrubs to flower beds. Wheelbarrows and manual tools like rakes, shovels, picks, and gas power tools are commonly used. This is a term that has been popularized in recent pop culture (2006 onwards) on television shows such as Home & Garden Television. The purpose of softscape is to lend character to the landscaping, create an aura, ambience, and reflect the sensibilities of the inhabitants.
The term softscape stands in contrast to hardscape, which represents inanimate objects of a landscape such as pavers, stones, rocks, planter boxes, arbors, water feature as well as structures of wood and natural stone and concrete, like retaining walls, patios, fences and decks, pergolas, and stairs.
Gardening is the practice of growing and cultivating plants as part of horticulture. In gardens, ornamental plants are often grown for their flowers, foliage, or overall appearance; useful plants, such as root vegetables, leaf vegetables, fruits, and herbs, are grown for consumption, for use as dyes, or for medicinal or cosmetic use.
A garden is a planned space, usually outdoors, set aside for the cultivation, display, and enjoyment of plants and other forms of nature. The single feature identifying even the wildest wild garden is control. The garden can incorporate both natural and artificial materials.
Ornamental plants or garden plants are plants that are primarily grown for their beauty but also for qualities such as scent or how they shape physical space. Many flowering plants and garden varieties tend to be specially bred cultivars that improve on the original species in qualities such as color, shape, scent, and long-lasting blooms. There are many examples of fine ornamental plants that can provide height, privacy, and beauty for any garden. These ornamental perennial plants have seeds that allow them to reproduce. One of the beauties of ornamental grasses is that they are very versatile and low maintenance. Almost any types of plant have ornamental varieties: trees, shrubs, climbers, grasses, succulents. aquatic plants, herbaceous perennials and annual plants. Non-botanical classifications include houseplants, bedding plants, hedges, plants for cut flowers and foliage plants. The cultivation of ornamental plants comes under floriculture and tree nurseries, which is a major branch of horticulture.
A shrubbery, shrub border or shrub garden is a part of a garden where shrubs, mostly flowering species, are thickly planted. The original shrubberies were mostly sections of large gardens, with one or more paths winding through it, a less-remembered aspect of the English landscape garden with very few original 18th-century examples surviving. As the fashion spread to smaller gardens, linear shrub borders covered up walls and fences, and were typically underplanted with smaller herbaceous flowering plants. By the late 20th century, shrubs, trees and smaller plants tend to be mixed together in the most visible parts of the garden, hopefully blending successfully. At the same time, shrubs, especially very large ones, have become part of the woodland garden, mixed in with trees, both native species and imported ornamental varieties.
A parterre is a part of a formal garden constructed on a level substrate, consisting of symmetrical patterns, made up by plant beds, low hedges or coloured gravels, which are separated and connected by paths. Typically it was the part of the garden nearest the house, perhaps after a terrace. The view of it from inside the house, especially from the upper floors, was a major consideration in its design. The word "parterre" was and is used both for the whole part of the garden containing parterres and for each individual section between the "alleys".
A perennial plant or simply perennial is a plant that lives more than two years. The term is often used to differentiate a plant from shorter-lived annuals and biennials. The term is also widely used to distinguish plants with little or no woody growth from trees and shrubs, which are also technically perennials.
Garden design is the art and process of designing and creating plans for layout and planting of gardens and landscapes. Garden design may be done by the garden owner themselves, or by professionals of varying levels of experience and expertise. Most professional garden designers have some training in horticulture and the principles of design. Some are also landscape architects, a more formal level of training that usually requires an advanced degree and often a state license. Amateur gardeners may also attain a high level of experience from extensive hours working in their own gardens, through casual study, serious study in Master gardener programs, or by joining gardening clubs.
Hardscape refers to hard landscape materials in the built environment structures that are incorporated into a landscape. This can include paved areas, driveways, retaining walls, sleeper walls, stairs, walkways, and any other landscaping made up of hard wearing materials such as wood, stone, and concrete, as opposed to softscape, the horticultural elements of a landscape.
The cottage garden is a distinct style that uses informal design, traditional materials, dense plantings, and a mixture of ornamental and edible plants. English in origin, it depends on grace and charm rather than grandeur and formal structure. Homely and functional gardens connected to cottages go back centuries, but their stylized reinvention occurred in 1870s England, as a reaction to the more structured, rigorously maintained estate gardens with their formal designs and mass plantings of greenhouse annuals.
This is an alphabetical index of articles related to gardening.
A flower garden or floral garden is any garden or part of a garden where plants that flower are grown and displayed. This normally refers mostly to herbaceous plants, rather than flowering woody plants, which dominate in the shrubbery and woodland garden, although both these types may be part of the planting in any area of the garden.
Dutch garden refers firstly to gardens in the Netherlands, but also, mainly in the English-speaking countries, to various types of gardens traditionally considered to be in a Dutch style, a presumption that has been much disputed by garden historians in recent decades. Historically gardens in the Netherlands have generally followed trends from neighbouring countries, but from the Early Modern period, Dutch gardens were distinctive for the wider range of plants available over the rest of Europe north of the Alps, and an emphasis on individual specimen plants, often sparsely planted in a bed. In the 17th century and into the 18th, the Dutch dominated the publishing of botanical books, and established the very strong position in the breeding and growing of garden plants, which they still retain. They were perhaps also distinguished by their efficient use of space, and in large examples, the use of topiary and small "canals", long thin, rectangular artificial stretches of water. When a distinctively "Dutch" style is claimed, it generally relates to formal styles in large gardens in the latter part of the 17th century, stretching on for a few decades.
The Brookside Gardens are public gardens located within Wheaton Regional Park, at 1800 Glenallan Avenue, Silver Spring, Maryland. The gardens themselves are open daily without charge. However, certain annual events there are held that may charge a fee. The gardens hosts a "Garden of Lights" exhibit that features a light display during the holiday season.
A Colonial Revival garden is a garden design intended to evoke the garden design typical of the Colonial period of the United States. The Colonial Revival garden is typified by simple rectilinear beds, straight pathways through the garden, and perennial plants from the fruit, ornamental flower, and vegetable groups. The garden is usually enclosed, often by low walls, fences, or hedges. The Colonial Revival gardening movement was an important development in the gardening movement in the United States.
The Botanical garden of Upper Brittany is a private estate with an area of 25 hectares, located in the Ille-et-Vilaine department of Brittany, near the medieval city of Fougères. The park is part of the estate of La Foltière, where stands the Château de la Foltière, built in 1847.
Temple Square in downtown Salt Lake City is surrounded by urban gardens and parks which cover approximately 14 hectares within Temple Square, the Conference Center, and the area surrounding headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The garden on the rooftop of the Conference Center, by design, has no annual plants; it is mostly herbaceous perennials and woody plants.
Gardening Naturally is a TV show series hosted by Barbara Damrosch and Eliot Coleman. It was created from 1993 to 1994 and ran until about 2003. It first aired on TLC and later reruns were shown on Discovery Home and Leisure.
The Columbus Park of Roses, also known as the Whetstone Park of Roses, is a public park and rose garden in Columbus, Ohio. The 13-acre (5.3 ha) park is located within the city's larger Whetstone Park in the Clintonville neighborhood. The free public park is operated by the Columbus Recreation and Parks Department.
Stonecrop Gardens is a public garden in Cold Spring, New York, U.S. Formerly the home of Anne and Frank Cabot, the founder of The Garden Conservancy, the ground became a public garden in 1992, directed by Caroline Burgess. A variety of gardens include woodland and water gardens, a bamboo grove, stone beds with alpine flowers, systematic flower beds and an enclosed English flower garden.
A woodland garden is a garden or section of a garden that includes large trees and is laid out so as to appear as more or less natural woodland, though it is often actually an artificial creation. Typically it includes plantings of flowering shrubs and other garden plants, especially near the paths through it.
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