Mediterranean Style Planting
- Mediterranean succulents.
A few of these architectural plants will go a long way. A palm or two will create a grouping. Since they come in a wide variety of heights and frond clusters, you can match or mingle to create a unique grove to command a corner of your garden. Olives and cypress make striking specimens as well.
Grasses create a graceful flow in your garden, swaying at the gentlest breeze, while herbs flourish, furnishing fragrant violet lavender and blue rosemary bushes for your beds and hedges.
Blooming jasmines and citrus flowers on full or dwarf trees provide heady aromas along with evergreen foliage and fruit. - A black succulent rosette provides contrast..
In the Mediterranean style, less is more: fewer flower beds and manicured lawns and more gravel ground covers, containers for color and dramatic specimens for contrast.
Succulents are seemingly endless in their variety of size, color, shape and uniqueness. From century plants that send up rare flower stalks that grow inches a day to spiky aloes in colorful hues to tiny ground covers that fill the spaces between paving stones, they can fill a niche in your garden.
Jade plants become hedges in this climate and come in several varieties, some with red-tinged leaves. - Mediterranean gardens can be filled with pelargoniums, some 200 varieties of perennials, succulents and shrubs known as geraniums or storksbills with bright flowers, variegated foliage and perfumed leaves. They are related to geraniums, which are often used in Mediterranean plantings as well.
Masses of aromatic, blue-hued lavender, exotic large flowered agapanthus and some of the bigger, bright-leafed hostas are at home in Mediterranean gardens. Clematis can replace the intense color of twining bougainvillea in cooler zones. - With more room between the flowerbeds, Mediterranean gardens can benefit from mulches. Designs created from various sized gravels can be used to great effects in these open gardens.
Vary the contrast with size or colors, or mix in some cedar chips or oyster shells; a trip to your garden center will give you a host of ideas to keep your weeding at a minimum while creating low-maintenance paths and border patterns in your new garden. Underground soaker hoses provide water in the dry months. - Finish your garden with tiled or whitewashed tables, benches, birdbaths or statues. Single specimens fit in with the décor and fountains furnish sound as well as humidity in dry air.
Bright blue ceramic pots of pelargoniums add a spot of Mediterranean color to the garden, as do wall pots with hanging blooms.
Add an artistic touch with murals painted on whitewashed walls.
Trees and Shrubs
Succulents
Flowers
Between Beds
Accessories
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