What's Your Garden Style — French or English?

Many of us here at Apartment Therapy are tending to less-than-palatial outdoor spaces. Often it's a window box or plant-filled balcony that makes up our apartments' "gardens". But even your choices in container gardens can be influenced by the French or the English garden...

formal French garden at Villandry. Image: Flickr member caspermoller licensed under Creative Commons

French gardens are formal. They're often symmetrical and plantings are trimmed in tidy geometries. Think green box hedges. Your small container garden equivalent might be like the linear wheatgrass or spherical topiaries pictured up top.

English garden in Hertfordshire. Image: Flickr member jimbowen0306 licensed under Creative Commons

The English garden is made to look much more like a natural landscape. It might even have an overgrown, untamed appearance. Think multi-color wildflowers. Your small container garden equivalent might be like the wildflower window box or fern-and-moss terrarium pictured up top.

top image: clockwise: Container Topiary, My Secret Garden, Eddie Ross, and Cottage Living

Comments (14)

Although a cute idea, I think this is a false dichotomy. What about Islamic or Asian garden style? They are very different from either French of English, and great historical styles.

If I had a house, I'd probably do French in front, English in back.

Mine is in the Mexican garden style: Terracotta planters, succulents, bougainvilleas..

My mother has a very English style front yard with flowers and decorative bushes but does square foot gardens (very french style) in her backyard with veggies and more flowers. LOVE her garden.

I'm not sure which style I fit into. Which one is for 'I water the peace lilly in my bathroom when it gets droopy'

I like the carefree, freeform style of gardening. In my case, whatever doesn't die on me and stays around. ;)

French style, as I understand it, involves extreme restraint.

English style tends to exuberance and a so-called "natural look."

French style is more difficult but incredibly beautiful when it comes off.

Lisa (Montreal)- Your ideal garden sounds like a mullet! Business up front, party in the back.

LOL at the mullet house idea. The difference is, I would never date a man with a mullet, but I might date a man with a mullet house.

I definitely go for the English style. Even when I buy asian plants and/or succulents, they manage to look very english. Probably because I use tea boxes as planters quite often.

I agree though, Asian gardens should certainly be included- they are crisp without being contrived like French gardens. Islamic gardens are pretty interesting, though I doubt it is as recognizable as other styles. Mexican and tropical seem to me to be similar to english in the more natural and untamed sense.

I crave symmetry, which I guess is a little more French formal perhaps?, but I love the wildness of the plantings in an English garden. Still trying to figure out how to impose more structure, on this garden, plus grow enough small scale trees that bush out over the fence so I can have more of a "secret" garden... I crave privacy and live in the crowded city! I want to sleep in a hammock, on a lazy Summer afternoon, without being observed by anyone but the birds.

Japanese.

With some natural woodland influences and, in some corners, maye a TOUCH of English...

hahaha. I love the idea of a mullet garden!

mine is california style.

jaja!!!! mine is almost mexican with californian terra cotta and plastic pots, bougainvillea, but also ferns,vines and flowers....no Cactus cause I live in Arizona and thats the least I want to see in my balcony garden...