Many areas of the home are subject to different trends, and gardens are no exception. Home and garden magazines and television shows are always showing new ideas, so it’s good for you to know what’s in fashion, as it’s likely that your customers will be asking you to put their ideas into practice.
The idea behind this trend is to blur the line between where the interior ends and the exterior begins. This doesn’t just mean laying a patio or building a deck, but really thinking about what the space will be used for; think instead that you are installing an outdoor entertainment area. It’s not just a summer trend either: building a fire pit can make this part of the home usable all year round.
The Wickes website has loads of project ideas that you might be asked to build, like this outdoor cinema.
Larger jobs can also fall under this category; as well as the perennial popularity of building a conservatory, trends in working from home have also seen a massive rise in the number of garden office rooms being built. A home office in the garden is great for work-life balance as home workers can leave the office behind at the end of the day.
Sustainability
Rather than choosing plants that will require a lot of water or chemical treatments to thrive in the current climate, customers are looking for gardens that are more naturally suited to the prevailing conditions. As well as the climate of the garden you are creating, you should also consider the type of soil and how much light and shade each area gets. Building a sustainable garden can also mean using a lot more plants rather than hard landscaping, in order to attract insects and bees.
And we encourage everyone to install water butts in their garden. They allow you to collect, store and recycle rainwater for the garden. Excellent for the environment and very useful during hose pipe bans.
One other sustainable idea is the restoration of old furniture to give it a new lease of life with a splash of colour. This can also extend to old pots or watering cans - any container can be repurposed as a quirky plant pot.
Rewilding
Going one step further than just thinking about sustainability, the latest buzzword is rewilding. This means considering how a garden can be enjoyed not just by people, but by insects, bees and other animal life.
Not only does this increase the biodiversity of outdoor space, it can also look amazing. A rewilded garden is one that looks like it has just been thrown together with no design or plan, with particular attention to the types of plants selected: think a wildflower meadow rather than shrubs.
It’s probably a good idea for you to find out which plants are suited to your local area and where you can source them from, and also think about what a rewilded area could be used for so that you can suggest to your customer's ideas like a mindful area.
Tapestry Lawns
A tapestry lawn is a lawn that doesn’t contain any grass, but rather uses other planting that does not require mowing. It’s a very different look, but again it’s another means of introducing as much diversity as possible into a garden. Another advantage is that by using a number of different plants which have their own life cycles, a tapestry lawn can offer different colours at different times of the year.
Plants can be arranged randomly or in a specific design. The aesthetics of a tapestry lawn can be maximised by choosing a mixture of colours, heights, textures, and flowering times.
Grow Your Own
With food prices growing ever higher, many people have started to grow their own fruit, vegetables, salads and herbs. They may need help with advice on which produce is best suited to different types of soil and where the best position in their garden is for planting.
Some people will get stuck in with just a bare patch of soil, but many will want to build raised beds (sleepers are great for this purpose) or even put up a small greenhouse so that they can carry on growing throughout the year.
