Garden Plants

The purpose of your garden will be the primary deciding factor in which garden plants you choose. A garden that you use as a food source will be stocked primarily with vegetables such as zucchini, squash, tomatoes, carrots, and peas. Interspersed with the food stock will be pest repellent flowers, such as zinnias. The planting will be orderly yet compact, to get the best yield per acre possible from your land.

A pleasure garden or walking garden will be planned much differently. There will be paths, with garden plants, ferns, flowers, and trees around them. The perfect walking garden will have something visually appealing happening with the flora in each month of the year, so that walking in May will be as pleasurable as, yet a different experience from walking in September. Depending on the climate, you may have a garden that has something in bloom all 12 months out of the year.

There are two distinct schools of thought when it comes to viewing or walking gardens. The European tradition has orderly flower beds arrayed in a neat procession, with everything arranged in careful precision. The Asian tradition is no less precise, but it seeks to convey a more organic experience than the European compartmentalization does. There are more trees and fewer flowering garden plants in an Asian viewing garden, and the area may be cunningly landscaped to convey a sense of being larger or more open than it actually is.