Designing gardens to use year-round is important for anyone who wants to make the most of their space.
Here in the British Isles, many people will focus on the spring and summer months and grow and use their gardens most during these times. But with the right choices and strategies, we can enjoy our gardens in every season, throughout the whole of the year.
In this article, we will talk about what you need to think about, and what you can do to design gardens to use year-round. So read on to learn how you might do more to make the most of your outside areas.
How To Make An All Season Garden
Five things are key to making an all season garden that you can put to good use all year round:
- Understanding the conditions where you live.
- Choosing the right plants.
- Creating a beneficial microclimate for the plants you wish to grow.
- Understanding how you can protect plants and extend your growing season.
- And making good plans for the gardening year.
Understand the Conditions Where You Live
In order to design an all season garden, it is first important to understand the conditions that you can expect in your garden throughout the year.
Of course, you need to know the climate where you live, the expected winter lows and summer highs of temperature, precipitation levels and water availability and how this varies through the seasons… etc…
All of these things and other details of the soil and environment will be crucial in making the right choices and, of course, choosing the right plants.
Choose Plants Suited To The Growing Conditions of Your All Season Garden
When you are choosing plants for an all season garden, the first things you need to think about are matching the needs of plants to the growing conditions that you can provide.
For example, you should make sure that you understand plant hardiness, so that you can choose perennial plants that can withstand the winter temperatures where you live. But there are also other considerations to bear in mind, such as resilience to winter wet, or summer heat or drought, to give just a few examples.
If you choose plants that are suited to the climate, micro-climate conditions and soil you will find it much easier to maintain a beautiful and productive garden all year round. Looking for plants native to your area can often be a great place to begin, since native plants will often have evolved to thrive in the conditions where you live.
Create a Beneficial Microclimate
Once you understand the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and challenges of your particular garden, you can begin to think about strategies that you might employ to create a more beneficial microclimate in your garden so allow crops and other plant life to thrive.
One thing to think about, for example, to create a more suitable space for year-round growing and gardens to use year-round, is how you can make the space more sheltered. You might, for example, consider creating a shelter belt or windbreak hedge.
Another idea that you might consider is creating a pond, which can, when carefully designed, catch and store energy from the sun and create a milder microclimate in the vicinity.
Embrace Undercover Growing
Especially if you wish to grow a wide range of edible annual crops, another option that will allow you to grow and create an all season garden is a polytunnel, or other undercover growing area.
Providing plants with protection allows you to far more closely control the environment, and grow a wider range of plants. Often, in a polytunnel, you can grow your own food not only in the main growing season, but all year round.
You can also use specific strategies to keep a polytunnel frost free, and, where necessary, to heat your polytunnel in winter in a sustainable way.
Make An All Season Garden Plan for Your Purposes
When you aim to design gardens to use year-round, you do of course have to carefully consider your goals.
Do you aim to be able to harvest food and other yields from your garden through every season?
Do you want your garden to be wonderful for wildlife throughout the year?
Or is your primary focus on making sure your garden has colour and sensory appeal throughout each season, and is a place you can spend as much time enjoying as possible?
Of course, you might focus on a single goal, or all of the above. In any case, the key to meeting your goals is planning and preparation. The more organised you are before you begin, the more likely your plans are to come to successful fruition.
For those who wish to grow their own food at home, it is important to create a calendar so that you understand what to sow, jobs to do, and what to harvest through each month of the year.
Choose The Right All Year Round Garden Plants
Creating a plan for your garden will of course involve thinking about plants for each of the main growing seasons – thinking about the functions those plants will fulfil and how you might combine them to reach your overall garden goals. Here are some of the best all year round garden plants that you can grow in your garden.
Spring Plants
In spring, many plants will emerge into fresh new growth. In our gardens, we should aim to have plenty of blooms around for early pollinators, as well as visual appeal, and will of course often sow plenty of seeds for an annual garden.
Spring bulbs are spring ephemerals, and these can be very useful to have in our gardens. They help us catch and store nutrients and water early in the growing season, some of which return to the soil for the benefit of other plants.
Fruit trees that bloom in the spring, along with other spring blooming trees and shrubs, will also be beneficial in spring, and may promise a bounty of fruit or berries for us (or wildlife) later in the year.
Summer Plants
Summer is a time of abundance, where everything in a garden can be lush, green and growing. Our annual summer gardens can, of course, be in full strength, and especially towards the end of the season, harvests can be abundant.
Of course, we need to ensure biodiversity is maintained, and companion plant to attract as much wildlife as possible if we want to grow successfully where we live. We should aim to have as many flowers in bloom as possible, as well as taking steps to make our gardens as productive as possible and make hay while the sun shines.
Autumn Plants
In autumn, summer growth begins to fade and the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness begins. By choosing fruit trees and berry producing bushes, we can ensure that we, and birds, can take advantage of the fruitfulness of the season.
Of course, we can also choose later flowering species, and plants with beautiful autumn foliage, to make sure our gardens are beautiful for us, as well as productive.
Winter Plants
Winter, of course, is one of the quietest times in our gardens, when many plants enter a period of dormancy and will slumber through until spring. But there can still be plenty of life in a winter garden.
We can choose cold hardy productive plants to obtain a yield, or continue growing undercover. We can also select evergreens, and plants with interesting bark, stems etc. to make sure our gardens continue to look good, even through the coldest part of the year.
Designing A Smaller All Season Garden
Creating a garden that is productive, beneficial and which looks good all year is not just for those with larger spaces. Remember, even with a tiny outdoors space, you might grow your own year-round. You can create beautiful winter container displays, or grow food under cover or even indoors if all you have is a sunny windowsill.
Additional Features For a Four-Season Garden
As well as thinking about plants, where you place them, and how you combine them, of course, you might also think about how you can add features to your garden that will allow you to make recreational use of the space through as much of the year as possible.
For example, you might add a covered seating area, a pergola or gazebo, or even a garden building that allows you to spend more time in your garden outside the summer months, and potentially even when the weather is cold and grey.
You might add an outdoor fireplace, fire pit or chiminea to keep off the chill in the shoulder seasons.
Thinking holistically about plants, wildlife and your own needs and wishes can help you design gardens to use year round for growing, recreation and more.
References:
https://www.housebeautiful.com/uk/garden/seasons/how-to/a576/year-round-colour-in-your-garden/
