Herb garden design is not something to be approached in a casual manner. There are so many different things to consider. Herbs can be planted in a formal garden, or interspersed with flowers, or as a theme garden. You can just make a patch of culinary herbs outside your kitchen door or create a medicinal herb garden.
Where your yard is large enough any gardener who has had plenty of experience and fancies a challenge, could try designing and making a formal herb garden. They are made up of a number of small square or rectangular beds laid out in a grid pattern with paths between the beds to provide access to each plot.
A master plan for an ideal formal herb garden would include, rectangular beds of different culinary herbs, interspersed with some smaller square beds containing medicinal herbs. While a formal garden can be laid at ground level the more usual way is to use raised beds, each bed devoted to a single species.
To increase the ambiance of formality, ornamental or flowering herbs should be planted in large clay pots placed at the cross junctions of the paths. There is no need to restrict yourself to just square and rectangular beds. As long as a strict balanced appearance is maintained, triangles and circular beds can be incorporated into the design.
The formal garden was first used by monks in their monastery gardens, and was picked up by wealthy landowners to decorate the outlook from the windows of their mansions. An extension to the basic idea of the formal garden was the knot garden, the feature of Victorian pleasure gardens and of course in gardens of royal palaces and the stately homes of England.
For the knot garden the geometric layout of each bed was emphasised by planting miniature boxwood hedge borders around it. Each bed would be planted with a single species of herb and the plants would be low-growing and compact such as thyme, hyssop, and rosemary, and the plants themselves would be laid out to form a geometric design.
The pathways were often filled colored sand or gravel or even with slabs of a distinctive local stone.
My name is John and I’ve been interested in growing and using herbs for longer than I care to think about. Having carried out a great deal of research on the subject I’ve now compiled a huge amount of knowledge which I want to share. To see more great information about Herb garden design, please visit my website where you will also find there are details of a free herb gardening mini-course that I have prepared for you, at: http://www.herbgardendelights.com
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