It Themes Like a Good Idea

 

As much as we all love gardening, there are times when it starts to get a little – well, dull. This is especially true when you find yourself planting the same kind of vegetables in the same space in the same patterns. Year after year, you know exactly what to expect. And it’s starting to get a bit boring.

Fortunately, there is a cure for this. It’s called the theme garden. With a theme garden, you choose a particular concept that you want your garden to reflect, and then you fill it with plants that fit that theme. A pizza garden, for example, would contain the plants of vegetables and herbs that you would typically find on a pizza, such as oregano, onions, basil, parsley, and tomatoes. A healing garden would contain herbs that have medicinal uses.

Here are some other ideas for themes around which you can build a garden.

Heirlooms – a garden of open pollinated, non-hybrid fruits and vegetables

Unusually-Colored Vegetables – fruits and vegetable cultivars that have a color that you don’t normally associate with those vegetables. Some examples would be Purple Dragon carrots, Black Krim tomatoes, Lemon cucumbers, Hopi Blue corn, and Rainbow chard.

A Garden of Song – fruits, vegetables, and other plants that show up in song titles. A flower garden of song, for example could include roses (“Rambling Rose”, “Roses of Picardy”); tulips (“Tiptoe Through the Tulips”), buttercups (“Build Me Up Buttercup”), and begonias (“Scarlet Begonias”)

Alphabet Garden – fruits, vegetables, and flowers that begin with each letter of the alphabet. If you have young children, this can be both fun and educational.

Those are just a few ideas to get your creative juices flowing. If you’d like more, then check out the website of the NC State College of Design, https://naturalearning.org/theme-gardens. And with a little brainstorming, I’m certain that you, too, can come up with some interesting garden themes. Then you can take your garden from snore to roar!

Themes. The cure for the common garden.

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