Pro tip: For edging garden beds, paths and driveways, you can’t go past Link Edge. With a modern aesthetic and safe roll top-edge, it’s easy to install, incredibly long lasting, won’t rust or crack and is great for creating curves or perfectly straight lines.
1. Unusual edible plants
Channel your inner Willy Wonka and deliver something unexpected! We’re thinking plants like the big-leaved monstera deliciosa, which produces large weird looking fruit that tastes like fruit salad. Or a gorgeous specimen that also happens to be a superfood – hello, goji berries and turmeric! Or just freak out the kids, with purple carrots. There are plenty of spectacular plants that are also edible at your local garden store or online.
2. Fauna friendly garden
We all know the importance of bees in the ecosystem. But what about the birds, butterflies, frogs, small native animals and lizards that traditionally use your postcode for their habitat? Planting native flowering trees and shrubs, and providing safe sources of water, can attract fauna back to your patch. By creating this small animal Airbnb, you’ll not only meet some cute visitors, you’ll also have hungry guests ready to eat the pesky bugs and beetles in your garden.
Image: Heather Miles, via GardenDrum
3. Outdoor room
If you want to impress your neighbours, turning a section of your garden into another living space is the way to do it. Won’t they be jealous when they sink into your sunken lounge area with oversized cushions, overhead speakers and an Aperol Spritz close at hand!
Image source: https://thelocalproject.com.au/brighton-5-by-inform-design-interior-architecture-archive-melbourne-nsw-australia
4. Strip lighting
Of course, if building a room is out of your budget or skill set, how about a lighting upgrade?
Your local hardware store or online lighting shop should have all you need to create some drama in your garden. Think celebrity style when you do this – make a grand entrance with strip lighting under stairs, stick some beneath that gorgeous floating concrete bench you like to lounge on, and give your outdoor kitchen some bling beneath the bench tops.
Image: Dieguez Fridman architects
5. Floating seats
Speaking of floating benches, they look like a million dollars (unlike those rickety banana lounges your sister bought you). Integrated with planter boxes and leafy shrubs, floating seats provide a great spot for a gossip session with the girls and a shady outdoor spot for the kids to read. Concrete looks super expensive, while timber provides a nice contrast to any nearby hard surfaces. For extra points, add a hardy garden bed below with good-looking garden edging to keep the plants or pebbles in check.
Image: Benn + Penna, via Est
6. Coastal plantings
Create that year round beach feel at home – and make your garden low maintenance with coastal plantings. This relaxed combination of mixed succulents, native ground covers and large drifts of silver, green and blue grasses is the perfect complement to the strong lines of contemporary homes. Where you’d ordinarily use paving, used decomposed granite – it not only looks like sand, it’s cost effective too. Throw in a few tropical plants, like frangipani, for height, fragrance and colour, and you have a low key, yet gorgeous garden for the senses. We can already hear the rustle of the tall grasses!
Image: Peter Fudge Gardens
7. Greater variety of plants
The days of minimalism are waning, inside the home and out. Now is the time to express yourself in the garden. Those perfect rows of agave and cordylines neat box hedges could use some gatecrashing fun. Dig in some perennial flowering shrubs, trailing vines and a lime tree to fuel those mojitos. Work with your favourite colours or be inspired by Pantone’s colour of the year, Ultra Violet.
Image: Grounded Gardens, via The Design Files