My favorite style is naturalistic, "the hand of man lightly stroking the earth". For me a naturalistic style evokes a peaceful, timeless quality that is sadly lacking these days.

My style is sort of a cottage garden. I'm sure I've broken several rules of horticultural design, but I just like to experiment with stuff and see how it looks.

I also plant lots of hummingbird plants so I guess you could say I have a hummingbird garden.

Mine is sort of naturalistic and sort of cottagey. I've been told my front yard looks like a park.

I'd have to call what I like 'intimate same but different.' For almost anything, 1 of them (or 1 clump) is enough for me. So you have to walk around and look closely at everything or you'll miss a lot - most of the plants are different. The 'same' part is that it's almost exclusively purple, pink, blue, and white flowers.

In the shady front, I've done a much more traditional planting using many different hostas, many different pansies, a variety of geraniums, all sorts of interesting and variegated foliage, and many different 'tall, spiky flowers.'

I love the winding, Get-lost-in-my-Garden style, with the lush flowers and the gray stone paths and wrought iron gates. The garden I have, though, is mostly just the I-like-this-so-I-grow-it kind. When I move, and have more room...

I also like the English Cottage Garden look.

Hmmmmmmmmm this is a tough question. Is there such thing as a bad gardening design? LOL...I like gardens that are natural looking and not too planned. I mean you need organization but I do not like gardens that are too structured. I love natural looking garden paths, flowers growing all around them. I like secret getaway from everyone places. My yard is 18 acres of mostly woods. All around the cleared part of the yard are several little "coves". We have only lived here for 5 years so it is no where near being how I want it to be but I do have an idea of what the "perfect" garden is for me. I want to build a gazebo in one of the little wooded niches ...I want it to be just decking with four house columns on it with a grape arbor over it. The paths that I am making this year leading up to it.

So basically a cottagy, do what you like type of thing. No two gardens ever look the same. What is cottagy to me may be English country to someone else. That is part of the fun of gardening...being individual. I also like it when I am able to incorporate every day items into the yard. I am not into trolls or cutsie commercial yard art, I like the old ladder used as a trellis, or the painted chair as a planter.

One thing I HATE in gardening is organization. I have a friend who plants equal amounts of everything in planned shapes... way too formal and anal for me. It looks "pretty" done but it is not something that I could live with. I like garden chaos and surprises!

Definitely the woodland garden! It's a good thing I love it, because i have three 60ft Bald Cypresses, one giant Red Cedar and and taller Sweet Gum (but I hate those "sticker balls").............and my lot is only 50x100. I'm trying to stick to local natives and butterfly/hummer plants.

I like also the Get lost-in-my-garden style, but with tropicals. Which is really a dream garden, 'cause I'm gardening on a balcony. I guess I just love "jungle".

Here is a link that might be useful: To my balcony ...

I like Russell Page's comment that a garden's design can best be judged in winter, when nothing is blooming. If a garden has good bones, then its beds can be planted with all sorts of "brightly colored hay" (to quote Page again) without appearing a shapeless muddle.

Interesting, there seems to be a consensus here to a fairly loose garden style-- "cottagey" "country", "woodland." All of which is what Im going for too.

Ideally, I want the garden I tend to look as if it looked after itself; part ruin, part Eden. Like some Johnny Appleseed started it then wandered off but by some splendid convergence of natural gifts it remained, flourishing in a wild, graceful, tumultous, subtle and ultimetly unclassifiable way. In short I want to take my small plot of prosaic urban village and find the Romantic sublime there. I will never suceed. I don't care. I love the attempt, every inch I manage towards that goal is a triumph. And who knows, maybe someday I'll find I have reached my goal? Or maybe Ill realize that I have all along?

Springcherry