Giving Your Garden a Sense of Age and Substance

I love to tour old, established gardens. There’s nothing so evocative as trees obscured by clinging vines and the scent of damp stones. It gets me thinking about how I’d use the garden, where my favorite place to sit would be if I’d lived there and what it would be like to grow up in a place like that. There’s a charm to an old garden that only patience can bring to a new garden.

But if you’ve ever been to a garden show with landscape displays, you’ve seen gardens that were put together in a matter of days, yet still have a sense of mellowed maturity. So I asked for some tricks of the trade: How to you give a new garden the feel of age? Five tips were repeated over and over:

1. Use of Weathered Objects
2. Well Placed Large Plants or Large Quantities of the Same Plant
3. Interwoven Plants and Layering
4. Spilling Plans
5. Worm paths

Here’s how some gardeners have brought the feel of age and substance into their newer gardens.

Photo: 2009 Capital District Garden & Flower Show. © Marie Iannotti