If you hanker after a more rustic, lived-in feel for your garden, start by visiting local vintage markets and snap up some wonderful bygone treasures, from old tools to stone troughs, window shutters, metal gates, zinc buckets and worn cobblestones. If you’re feeling creative, look for discarded pallets or driftwood to turn into handmade furniture or garden ornaments. Rustic gardens are also great havens for wildlife and work well even in the smallest urban spaces.
Claudia De Yong Garden Design
Build in country-style fencing. A rustic hardwood fence will not only look great, but can last for years. The wooden stakes in a fence like this can be attached by taut, twisted wire or nailed to horizontal bars. Using tree trimmings from a sustainable, well-managed forest where pesticides aren’t used will help ensure the health of our woodlands, which are a haven for wildlife.
Claudia De Yong Garden Design
Get creative with containers. Using different styles of containers will help you achieve a more rustic look for your urban garden, balcony or roof terrace. You can use so many things as containers for plants: tin cans, zinc buckets, stone sinks, animal troughs, vintage wooden crates. Just make sure you provide drainage holes at the bottom and choose the correct compost.
Containers can be gathered and made into a small tabletop collection, much as you might arrange a group of photo frames and other ornaments inside the home.
Claudia De Yong Garden Design
Welcome wildlife. In addition to installing bird boxes, a birdbath and bird feeders in your garden, consider adding an insect hotel to encourage beneficial creatures. You can buy ready-made ones or easily construct one from an old pallet or any other recycled wood.
Fill the gaps with dead wood for stag beetles, wood lice and centipedes. Cut bamboo canes into bundles for solitary bees. Fill other areas with dry sticks, straw and dried leaves for many garden invertebrates, and tiles that newts and frogs can hide beneath.
Claudia De Yong Garden Design
Branch out. To create height and add interest, use handmade hazel or willow obelisks. Willow and birch branches can also be woven into other rustic features if you have the space in the garden for items such as pergolas and arbors.
Obelisks can be used to support climbers in large pots even if you don’t have a garden. Choose a pot that’s the right size for the obelisk and push the canes into the soil, so the structure won’t get blown off by the wind. Plant clematis, sweet pea, roses and other climbers that do well in pots, although you’ll need very big, deep pots for most climbers to establish a good root system.
rumkihn.com
Pick up a pallet. Pallets are such versatile items: Use them in the garden to create anything from benches to vertical gardens, vegetable gardens, tables, tool storage and much more. Homespun DIY elements are the opposite of what you would find in the stereotypical polished urban plot.
If you want to use a pallet as a vegetable planter, make sure it hasn’t been treated with or exposed to harmful chemicals — and be warned that most of them have.
Pallets can be painted or left in their natural state. Be careful with splinters from the wood, which is often rough, and if you’re using a pallet as a vertical planter on a terrace or against a wall, make sure it’s well-supported so it won’t fall over.
To support plants, you’ll need to get crafty with some landscape fabric and a staple gun. Look online and you’ll be able to browse various techniques for using these to create the necessary plant pockets to turn your pallet into a planter.
Remember too that when you water the plants in a vertical pallet, you’ll create runoff that might stain pale surfaces at the bottom.
Garden Rant
Pave your way. For a really rustic touch, mix paving with old bricks, worn cobblestones and irregular flagstones; hunt for a good mix at local salvage yards. Old bricks and cobblestones will soon become homes to moss and lichen, especially if the joints aren’t filled with mortar. Make sure the bricks you choose are frost-resistant, otherwise they’ll soon start to crumble and your path or paved area will become dangerous.
Gravel also works well for a rustic mood and looks good mixed with bricks and among clusters of scented plants, such as thyme.
Jay Sifford Garden Design
Let your plants wander. Self-seeding plants drive some people to distraction, but for a rustic feel, they are to be encouraged — as long as you don’t mind where they appear!
Varieties of self-seeding plants include Verbena bonariensis, granny’s bonnet (Aquilegia vulgaris), Eryngium giganteum, toadflax (Linaria spp.), forget-me-not (Myosotis sylvatica), foxglove (Digitalis purpurea) and poppy (Papaver orientale).
Also consider introducing mind-your-own-business (Soleirolia soleirolii) between the gaps in paving, and soon it will naturalize, creating a soft, verdant mat.
Chris Snook
Weave in natural seating. There are various ways to create rustic seating. You can pick up old metal or wooden garden tables and chairs with a wonderful patina at flea markets and vintage shops. Or you could find local craftsperson-made wooden benches, tables and chairs. For a quick idea, why not use some large tree trunks for stools, as seen here? Don’t be afraid to mix and match different types of chairs.
To enhance the seating area, add galvanized steel containers planted with trees or perennials.
Hort-Couture
Step up your displays. Repurpose an old ladder as a plant stand to add vertical interest. Painted or left untreated, ladders are great for displaying many different plants and work just as well indoors as outside. Plants will get more sunlight and air circulation than in containers on the floor, which will help with flowering and avoid diseases.
Scour vintage fairs and flea markets to find old metal gates, shutters, windows and all sorts of similar pieces to add to the rustic feel. You can easily pick up galvanized steel buckets and watering cans too, which work well on ladders as decorative items or can be used as planters with drainage holes drilled in the bottom.
Cool Gardens Landscape Associates – CGLA
Go modern-rustic. For a real rustic garden, you’d normally use discarded old mirrors, sash windows, painted wooden shutters, old doors and metal gates to create focal points. For a more contemporary take on the rustic look, however, use smooth paving and furniture with clean lines, as seen here.
Add other touches by decorating a green hedge or fence as you would a wall in the house: Hang outdoor pictures and mirrors and stained-glass panels, creating the feeling of an outdoor living room.
Tell us: What touches do you think add that lived-in rustic look to a garden? Share your ideas in the Comments below.
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