How To Design A Garden That Connects Your Home To Nature

How to design a garden is a question we all come across at some point in our lives, a daunting task to undertake and consider. But, now gone are the days where our homes were built to be separate environments to the outside world. More and more contemporary Australian homes are being designed using architectural methods that help to bring the outdoors in. 

From adding larger windows to our homes to constructing facades and interiors with natural materials like timber, clay or mud brick, and marble, and incorporating green home decor like decorative planters, there are an abundance of ways to bring the natural world into your home. But how exactly can you help add this same effect of melding home and heartland into your backyard spaces? How to design a garden with so many variables and ideas to consider?

Today, we’ll be sharing our top tips for designing modern garden spaces that help effortlessly connect your home to the natural world. Read on to learn just how to design a garden that is sure to become a sanctuary for all eco warriors and garden lovers. 

• How To Design A Garden? Play With The Four Elements
• Use Naturalistic Walls and Pathways
• Incorporate Bee and Bird-Attracting Plants
• Hang Some Nature-Inspired Wall Art

How To Design A Garden? Play With The Four Elements

Designing with the natural world in mind will undoubtedly mean incorporating natural elements. And what better way to incorporate natural elements than making efforts to play with all four, these being earth, air, water, and fire? Utilising these four natural elements in your garden design can organically help add a sense of life and action to your backyard. 

Consider installing some backyard water features made with natural build materials to represent your water and earth elementals. If your fountain or water feature presents a waterfall, it may also provide an air element to your garden space by creating a cool, refreshing breeze.

Air can also be represented through the flow of your garden space. Consider the layout of your garden’s pathways and plant life, and how all these design elements work together in order to create a flow of air, light, and space throughout your finished and fully landscaped garden. 

And as for playing with fire, incorporating fire heaters or torches to your backyard can add both some warmth and verticality to your garden space. If you’d like the only vertical elements in your garden to be trees, then why not add an electric fireplace to your garden complete with some surrounding timber or wicker tables and seating?

Use Naturalistic Walls and Pathways

In accordance to your question on how to design a garden? Your garden may require some man-made elements in order to enhance its functionality and comfortability for you and your family, this doesn’t necessarily mean that your man-made elements need to contradict from your natural theme. There are an abundance of garden decor, walls, and pathways that have been constructed using natural or organic materials.

A good example on how to design a garden, would be bamboo screens and stone pathways, just to name a few. You can place bamboo screens over your fences in order to provide a neutral backdrop and perhaps even create a jungle effect for your garden space. Similarly, naturalistic stone pathways can be a far more attractive alternative to concrete pathways in your garden.

If you have any garden statues that you’d like to add to your space, consider finding pathways that match the materials used to create these figurines. In doing so, you’ll be able to ensure that your garden statue feels as organic as possible in your garden space, as if it were carved by the winds of time itself. 

Incorporate Bee and Bird-Attracting Plants

The best nature-inspired garden spaces are those that actually inspire the natural world to interact with your built backyard environment. That’s why more Aussie households are opting to include bee and bird-attracting plants into their garden spaces.

Adding bee and bird-attracting plants to your garden won’t just provide you and your household with plenty of opportunities to interact with native bugs and animals, but it can also help support those bugs and animals throughout the year. For example, providing bees with plenty of flowers to pollinate can help your local ecosystem thrive during spring and summer. Bee pollination can, in turn, inspire other bugs to visit your garden, which may then attract birds who are looking to feed and drink, if you have also added some bird baths to help them stay hydrated through the summer.

As soon as you know it, your quest on how to design a garden will begin to unfold. Your garden will soon be teeming with life, and your verandah becomes a kind of outdoor theatre from which you can watch a nature documentary in real time.

Hang Some Nature-Inspired Wall Art

Although it may seem easier to design a nature-inspired backyard over a nature-inspired home simply because backyards already organically possess green elements, DIY designers are likely to find that designing around these existing green elements is truly easier said than done. Our home interiors are like a blank canvas when it comes to designing with nature in mind, whereas our backyard and garden spaces will already be accompanied by a few natural elements that you’ll likely need to design around. 

As a result, it can take a little trial and error to cultivate a truly harmonious backyard or garden space that effectively melds the natural elements of your home with the wider, wilder world that exists outside your windows. Thankfully, you don’t need to incorporate solely natural materials or plant life into your garden space in order to create a nature lover’s haven. Even something as simple as some botanical art prints can help boost the natural elements of your garden space. 

Fountain Store has a range of nature-inspired garden decor and designs to help bring a touch of the Aussie bush to your own backyard. From native Australian wall art to painted concrete and acrylic planters that are perfect for presenting native plants and trees, you can easily create modern Aussie garden spaces that feel like a bush sanctuary all on their own.

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Creating nature-inspired backyards is about so much more than just doing some gardening. It’s about finding ways to blur the lines between the great Australian bush that exists outside of your home, and the contemporary design of your own home. As the middle man between these two distinct environments, your garden space is where you can feel totally free to meld natural and man-made elements together in order to create truly awe-inspiring environments that are able to incorporate the best of both worlds.