Vibrant and aesthetic spaces, gardens are incredibly beautiful features that enhance your home but also play a number of important roles.
Continuing the bespoke ambience of your home beyond its walls and out into your landscape, gardens are extremely personal places that can be shaped to suit yours and your family’s lifestyles. Designed to include a variety of immersive structures and fragrant planting schemes, gardens are wonderfully interactive areas that are crafted to be enjoyed by all. Proven to considerably improve wellbeing, support local wildlife and boost the overall value of your property, let’s find out why gardens are such valuable and important spaces.
Boosts wellbeing
It has been found that just being outdoors and immersing yourself in green spaces can significantly improve our overall mental and physical wellbeing. According to Mind (2023), frequently surrounding yourself in nature can considerably benefit your mental health and reduce the effects of both anxiety and depression. Found to reduce stress, boost mood and encourage relaxation, gardens are delightfully peaceful spaces that can be designed to include a range of idyllic features such as water fountains and ponds for optimum tranquillity.
The act of gardening itself also has a wide range of physical benefits. A great form of aerobic exercise, it has been discovered that tasks such as mowing, planting and digging are just a handful of ways to boost your flexibility and strengthen your muscles. A more gentle form of exercise, gardening is a very inclusive activity that everyone can get involved with and is a useful form of exercise to add to your everyday routine. Gardening is also a fantastic activity for your little ones too, as it can help in the early stages of development, awakening their senses and boosting creativity levels.
Environmental benefits
Brimming with multiple varieties of native plants and trees, gardens are vital sources of food and shelter for all kinds of local wildlife. Dressing your borders and beds with an expert planting scheme primarily transforms your space into a beautiful outdoor scene. However, with the skilled touch of a professional designer you can better ensure that the best plants are selected for waves of pollinators to be drawn into the garden. A vital source of nectar and pollen, garden blooms frame a breathtaking vista but also considerably reduce air pollution, helping to significantly improve your local air quality. Having a variety of different plants and trees dotted throughout your garden also helps other wildlife such as hedgehogs, insects and birds, providing them with a range of sheltered areas to protect them from potential predators.
Composting within your garden is another easy and effective way of how your outdoor spaces can be used to support the environment. Slotting a smart set of composting bays into your garden’s landscape is a practical way of significantly reducing your carbon footprint and your household waste. Sustainable and cost-effective, composting allows you to dispose of food, household, and garden waste all in one place. Made from natural materials that blend seamlessly into your garden’s existing environment, compost bays are both an environmental investment but also provide you with organic and nutrient-rich compost to spread throughout the garden all year round!
Encourage a sustainable lifestyle
As we have previously explored, gardens can dramatically improve wellbeing but they can also encourage you and your family to lead much more sustainably conscious lifestyles. For example, kitchen gardens are essential garden design features that have considerable environmental benefits. The act of growing your own fruits and vegetables is again wonderful for supporting your garden’s natural environment but also provides you with plentiful amounts of organic and home grown ingredients. Reducing your need for shop bought produce, growing your own produce simply shrinks your household’s carbon footprint, lowering the demand for supermarket produce that is typically imported from overseas.
If you love to fill your house with fragrant and colourful blooms, then a cutting garden is another sustainable garden feature that can be installed within your outdoor space. Again decreasing your need for shop-bought blooms that have been imported from all around the world, why not grow your very own cut flowers and fill your home with vibrant blooms plucked fresh from your very own garden. Providing you with variety of gorgeous cut blooms, cutting gardens are most importantly a fabulous opportunity to enjoy floral beauty in a way that also gives back to wildlife and supports your local environment.
Special social spaces
Extending your home into the outdoors, gardens are abundant natural spaces that can be filled with a series of outdoor rooms for all your family and friends to enjoy. From stylish outdoor seating areas to panoramic spa areas, your garden can be moulded into a variety of social spots for you to welcome in handfuls of guests. From an al fresco catch up with an old friend under a shaded pergola to a romantic drink beneath the stars with your partner, gardens are intimate spaces that enable you to host a number of social events and cosy chats. Able to be used all year round, sheltered garden features such as roofed dining spaces, arbours and gazebos even allow you to enjoy outdoor social occasions no matter the weather conditions or the season.
Looking to reinvent your outdoor spaces with striking features and dynamic planting? Discover how we create beautifully authentic garden designs.
