Unlike the dated wallpaper in the living room or those dreadful tiles in the bathroom you can’t hide your garden from visitors (and in the case of some gardens you can’t hide from simple passers-by either!) And if you want to wow your guests next time you host a garden party then you’ll want to incorporate some of these trends into your garden design.

Indoors outdoors and outdoors indoors

One of the biggest trends in recent years, fuelled to some extent by more sunshine and drier weather, is to blur the distinction between indoors and outdoors. Trifold doors that allow entire walls to be opened up to the garden, and taking exterior design cues from interior design ideas will enable you to make the most of your open space.

Wildlife-friendly

Another trend is to improve conditions in gardens for wildlife. Out are vast expanses of velvet cut lawn and in are wildflower meadows, hedgehog boxes and frog-friendly ponds. Many wildlife-friendly gardening measures can be surprisingly low maintenance – thyme and clover as ground cover instead of grass require a lot less mowing and watering, for example.

Resilient gardening

Another huge trend is for climate change ready gardens. Planting hardy native plants that can fend for themselves and cope with extremes of temperature and drought as well as designing the hard landscaping to promote a healthy garden is very popular at the moment. Such gardens have water-storage systems and use permeable materials to allow natural drainage of water to take place. Limiting planting schemes to resilient plants leads to low maintenance gardens that can survive whatever the weather decides to throw at them this week.

Changing boundaries

In line with being more wildlife friendly, we’re seeing more people opt to use hedging instead of fences to delimit their garden or to divide up the space. Where low-maintenance is essential, then log pile and Gabion walls are seeing huge popularity. Once installed, the nooks and crannies provide ample space for helpful insect life such as bees, as well as looking impressive!

Colour

Colour is everywhere in modern gardens. From painting walls and fences in strong shades to planting brightly coloured plants, often choosing varieties that deliberately clash when flowering the trend is for colour, colour and more colour. Kitsch is most definitely on trend, and large, structural plants are also incredibly popular such as pompom dahlias or green twister echinacea.