Sea holly is a water-wise plant that attracts butterflies and bees to gardens. Waterwise plants and those that support pollinators are gardening trends for 2023.
Erica Browne Grivas
It’s that time of year — that’s right, when we get to future-cast our gardens.
Here is a roundup of predicted garden trends worldwide for 2023. These are not based on formal polls, but a bird’s-eye view of them can help track where gardeners are today and maybe where we are going. The trends may look wildly disparate at first glance, but repeated themes emerge taken together.
Back to Eden, by way of “Bridgerton”
For example, Veranda magazine’s six 2023 garden trends via Monrovia plant distributors have Scandinavian minimalism and new Victorian side by side as numbers four and five. Despite the name Scandinavian minimalism, it’s described as a painterly, dreamy look with neat evergreens paired with airy flowers, with low contrast in colors. I’m reading that as Piet Oudolf’s gardens in fall, picturing the flowers of grasses, Verbena bonarensis and umbellifers like dill.
As for New Victorian, it offers my new favorite quote: “Blame it on “Bridgerton,” from Monrovia’s chief marketing officer. This trend is calling for a romantic palette of white, pink and purple lilac and roses with heady fragrance corralled by historic arbors and tuteurs. No mention was made of the faux wisteria that blooms 365 days a year on the “Bridgerton” set, however.
Monrovia’s No. 1 trend was Garden of Eden, a catch-all incorporating food for humans and pollinators, building on the edible/ornamental gardening trend that got a huge food-chain-powered boost from the pandemic. The final trend is waterwise plants because water conservation will be a forever issue for every garden from here on — even in the Pacific Northwest.
RHS: planet-focused planting
Houseplants that have been a juggernaut for the last couple of years, top the UK’s Royal Horticultural Society’s list. According to HouseBeautiful.com, the RHS theorizes exotics that thrive in cooler temperatures will be on the rise as heat waves have people turning down their thermostats.
Environmentally friendly practices make up the bulk of the RHS’ list, including regenerative gardening, climate-ready landscaping, pollinator lawns and choosing plants over costly hardscape.
Regenerative Gardening, specifically in composts and mulch alternatives to peat-based products pending a UK ban in 2024. Harvesting peat is extremely disruptive to the environment, and we use it for sowing seedlings, as a growing medium for nursery plants, and in compost. The United States has no such ban, but you may want to consider finding alternatives using elements like coco coir and leaf mold.
RHS also notes that technology will be ever-more useful to gardeners, as they design and tend their gardens with planting calendars, hydroponic gardening and watering reminders.
Garden Media Group: Robots, WitchTok
Garden Media Group’s 2023 Trend Report highlights both the rise of technology and sustainable gardening practices. GMG asserts that the green industry has been faster to make the switch from gas-fueled to electric or battery-powered in lawn mowers and leaf blowers than any other industry. That’s pretty cool.
Technology will assist gardeners with apps, plant monitors, QR-code shopping and more. In addition, we may finally have reached the age of the robot in gardening. The makers of Roomba have created Tertill, a solar-powered weeding robot that moves in a similar way. Tertill requires beds have a 4-inch barrier and both plants and rows to be spaced a foot apart. So, while it may work for flat, traditional vegetable beds, Tertill wouldn’t last long in my hilly, cram-scaped mixed garden.
On the other hand, TikTok is showing us plant hacks galore, of varying validity, but GMG spotlights several trending uber-retro hashtags from #Moon Garden (labyrinths, planting by the moon, white gardens), and #Gnomecore” (impish, colorful accents and colors ready for a party), to #WitchTok (ancestral knowledge, ethnobotany and magic).
Garden Design Magazine
Garden Design’s roundup — I assume from trends in its coverage, though the story doesn’t specify — echoes many of the notes struck in the other lists. It includes cutting gardens; cottage gardens, which often historically would include edible/herbal and cutting flowers; Mediterranean-style gardens, which are typically waterwise; swapping lawns for meadows; focusing on foliage texture; and vertical gardening.
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In writing this roundup over several years, some of the more sweeping garden trend themes I’ve noticed are manifestations of larger societal ones. Climate-friendly gardening, from lawn alternatives to pollinator pathways, is a response to climate pressure concerns and species decline. Edible gardening was already gaining before the pandemic surge, I believe, because of increased knowledge about pesticide dangers in our produce. Dwarf cultivars, container gardening and vertical gardening reflect an increasingly dense population in urban centers.
If I had to sum it up, I’d say we’re getting a little closer to the earth again as gardeners – we may use apps or robots to do it, but more are growing the plants they need in the space they have while keeping an eye on their impacts on wildlife.