A Celtic garden makes good use of symmetry, just like an English garden.
Your Celtic garden represents a great opportunity to bring a bit of the old country into an American landscape. This type of garden incorporates a variety of green plants that would grow well in a climate like Ireland, the Emerald Isle. You should evaluate each plant for its suitability to your local climate and determine if it would pose a threat to other plants in the area. Remember to incorporate stone into a Celtic garden design.
Yew Trees
A Celtic garden design need not rely on stonework to establish a sense of place. You can use yew trees for a contrast of wood and greenery. According to the Woodstock Gardens and Arboretum, the yew tree has a long history as a native tree of Ireland. Use yew trees to provide shade for other green plants that do not grow well in direct sunlight. However, check that yew trees are permitted to be grown in your yard under local agricultural regulations.
Lucky Clover
Some garden spaces do not have room for trees, but they do need lots of green. According to Fine Gardening, a hardy green plant is the shamrock. With its sacred significance to the Druids in Celtic legend, the shamrock brings good luck to a garden and serves as an easy-to-recognize symbol of Ireland. Grow this plant in its American form, the lucky clover, as a substitution for grass. The lucky clover can cover a large area, such as a large circle or square bordered by a wall or line of large stones.
Boxwood
Your Celtic garden needs more than just ground cover and shade. It needs plants that provide round shapes, creating three-dimensional shapes in the garden space. The boxwood is a traditional shrub used in a Celtic garden, such as a knot garden. You can find many varieties of this rounded shrub plant in the United States. A boxwood must be dug and planted carefully, but it can also be found in small to large sizes. Boxwood shrubs create ideal borders for a knot garden.
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