How to Design a Whimsical Woodland Garden | Create Your Own Forest Garden | Cottage Garden Design

Hello everybody! 💚

Spring is in full swing—but with the rainy weather keeping us out of the garden, it’s the perfect time to sit inside, dream, design, and get inspired. In today’s video, I’m diving into the magical world of woodland garden design—a growing trend in modern landscaping and a favorite feature at this year’s Chelsea Flower Show! ✨🌲

Discover how to bring that enchanting woodland aesthetic to your own backyard with garden design tips, the best shade-loving plants, and ideas for crafting a serene, storybook-style landscape. Whether you’re working with a large space or a shady corner, this video will help you create a peaceful, low-maintenance garden that thrives in dappled light and dry, nutrient-poor soil.

🌼 In this video, you’ll learn:
How to design a woodland-inspired garden
My top plant recommendations for shade gardens and forest-style planting
Garden layout tips to evoke that natural, organic woodland charm
And watch me design a woodland garden live!

Perfect for fans of cottage gardens, naturalistic planting, and eco-friendly landscaping. If you love the idea of walking through a green canopy with light dancing on colorful blooms, this one’s for you!

💬 Don’t forget to comment with your favorite woodland plants—I’d love to know what you’re growing!

🪴 Subscribe for more gardening inspiration, garden tours, landscape design ideas, and seasonal planting guides every week.

With love & leafy dreams,
Anna 🌿

#WoodlandGarden #GardenDesign #ShadeLovingPlants #BackyardInspiration #EnchantedGarden #ChelseaFlowerShow #GardeningTips #SpringGardening #EcoFriendlyGarden #GardenDesignIdeas

shade beneath trees often comes with thirsty roots and lean soil but don’t let this deter you because there are things that you can do to encourage your plants and also to help them along the way stay tuned to the end of the video because I’ll be designing a woodland garden for you in real time [Music] first off we have to know what a woodland garden is a woodland garden mimics that quiet magic of the forest floor it’s a tapestry of layers trees that shelter shrubs that soften and underplanting that sparkles with color in the shadows whether you have a sprawling yard or a small quiet corner you can shape a shady retreat that feels both wild and wondrous when you’re creating a woodland garden you really want to lean into and kind of feel into the mood of the garden the mood of the space what feeling do you want to create as you move through your woodland retreat because that cottage woodland aesthetic is not so much about the shapes and the structures as it is about the feeling that you have when you’re in it for me it evokes feelings of coziness interest intrigue whimsy romance uh one of my favorite places in the world is in the redwoods in Northern California specifically Prairie Creek Redwood State Park i used to go there all the time when I lived in Northern California i was just a little bit um a little bit south of that and it was just the most magical paradise i always say in the redwoods that are closer to San Francisco it’s you know there are more people than redwoods and in Prairie Creek there are just so many more redwoods than people you can walk for hours on end and not run into a single soul but your soul is so touched and enveloped in the beauty that surrounds you so for me that feeling of enchantment of curiosity is so present when I like to design woodland gardens i want to create something that makes you feel at peace very serene but also like you can’t your eyes can’t get full enough you know you’re constantly hungry for more for seeing more experiencing more a garden really that’s of the senses and that’s why my biggest piece of advice if you’re designing a woodland garden is to really let your heart be the head gardener create winding paths gravel bark or moss maybe even old tree stumps cut and shaping a beautiful meandering thoroughare through this gorgeous woodland paradise tuck in weathered benches beneath the trees little moments for a rest bit as you’re meandering through this beautiful space allow ramblers or climbers maybe even things like ivy to scramble through the woodland maybe sprawling over a stone wall and allow nature to have a say in the design for me what that means is taking the things that grow wild in our area and kind of embracing them as part of this woodland this woodland space so we have so many ferns in this area i know fern experts i’ve interviewed them and they just go out and really try to find all of the beautiful ferns that are in this area because locally we have some really incredible rare species of ferns but on our property we have a lot of common ferns but they’re just gorgeous the interrupted fern the Christmas fern so I like to just gather those divide them transplant them into specific spaces in our garden knowing that they’re going to thrive that they’re just going to grow beautifully like these gorgeous fountains of plumes we also have fox gloves that grow wild for us a lot of the shasta daisies that grow wild in this area the white daisies that grow wild in this area they’ll grow in the shade we have colines that have naturalized not in our garden that we brought in but just wild ones throughout we have tons of wild orchids obviously I would never move any of the wild orchids that I’ve seen but I have seen beautiful orchids in the wild here and so just knowing that that’s what thrives in this space that’s what thrives in these woodlands is such a key into what I can plant in my in my own garden taking a more common variety maybe of an orchid or something and placing that throughout the borders taking the the structures and the shapes that are really inspiring to me and just allowing them to freckle the landscape sparkling out in those darker places and let’s say you just have a maybe a shady corner in your backyard well that’s a wonderful opportunity just to see the shape and structure of the tree that’s there that’s creating the shade you know in this way we can play with nature play with what’s there and also add our own little spark our own little painterly strokes into the garden design next up let’s talk about the woodland plant palettes these are shade lovers and storytellers now here is where all this poetry meets the page these are the magical plants that thrive in dappled shade even in dry spots beneath thirsty trees so one of the first things to consider is ground covers ground covers and foliage so what you want to think about for ground covers is one of my husband’s favorite things is walking through a woodland that has very low planting so not so many shrubs but just lots of maybe perennials and self cedars throughout the space he even likes a woodland that just has almost just bark or just mulch or just pine you know pine straw from the trees above so that you can really see and feel the forest and here we get a lot of mist on the mountains so having that mist kind of coming through the garden is so intensely magical and when it’s not impeded by the shrubs there is something just very enchanting about that and that’s where ground covers can come in in our little woodland dining garden we’ve planted lots of lamium we’ve planted it actually throughout cuz it does really well in the sun for us as well but in those darker spaces the lamium just really shines it’s dead nettle so it has that beautiful nettleshaped flower it’s really gorgeous the bumblebees absolutely love it it blooms earlier it stays evergreen for most of the winter even though we get really quite harsh and cold winters here with lots and lots of snow and it’s just a really beautiful one for those woodland gardens it’s done really well for us at the base of really thirsty trees that are sucking up all the moisture that’s there so it’s a fantastic one to consider any woodland ground cover that enjoys a dry shade for us that’s things like epimedium sweet woodruff does pretty well once established and another one that grows wild here for us the Canadian windflower that one really loves the drier shade once it’s established and things like Brunner and Pulmania with their bright zingy foliage and lily of the valley once they’re established they really do enjoy being in that dappled woodland setting in a cottage garden I love to plant things kind of spread out instead of doing beautiful drifts I like to sort of sprinkle and pepper the the borders through with a repetition of the same perennials and annuals i think that adds a rhythm and a flow to the garden that really draws you down and it feels very abundant but there’s always interest in every little nook and cranny there’s different levels of interest if it’s if it’s designed in a way with that in mind in woodland gardens I really love seeing sads of color seeing whether that’s a beautiful cluster of hakana cloa that zingy Japanese forest grass or the calm broad leaves of a hosta just playing out in a border together all in a suede of that beautiful soft blues and greens and even some yellows brunner coming together as well with those beautiful daisyshaped forget me not blue flowers in the springtime and pulmonaria with those gorgeous pink purple and blue bell-shaped flowers that bloom earlier than any other perennial for us seeing those strokes of color and foliage interest really helps to give you an established sense of peace cohesion and harmony in your darker shadier or dappled borders and so intermingled amongst these swaves of foliage interest I love to add pops of color so whether that’s present in annuals things like impatience do really well for us in those situations the double impatients are gorgeous but just any impatience that you can get they’re just so gorgeous in those settings violas do beautifully well bralia is a really gorgeous one for those dappled shady areas and particularly a white Brawalia can really sing out in such a glorious way beonas are fantastic to add that splash and pop of color and you could get creative and maybe have a hanging basket in your woodland garden that’s just spilling over with terrenia but primula vulgaris and primula japonica have these romantic early spring blooms that can add so much joy in those shadier borders and then another bianial that I absolutely love probably one of my favorite plants of all time is the fox glove just so perfect for a woodland setting they are charming cottagey romantic uh the pollinators just love them the butterflies bumblebees honeybees all the bees hummingbirds just love the fox gloves they selfseed beautifully for us and it’s just such a charming one to grow in a woodland setting these beautiful towers of flower that last for several months and we get those wild fox gloves those beautiful soft yellow grand flora fox gloves all throughout our woodland so just spreading those seeds in the autumn into areas of the woodland that we want to establish as part of that beautiful colorful painterly effect with the fox gloves is a wonderful way of doing it wait till the seed the seed pods dry and then just take them out there with gloves on since every part of the fox glove is poisonous but just take it out there and just shake those seeds out through the area that you want and then they’ll just spring up everywhere but they will spring up everywhere just anyway because of the nature of having thousands and thousands of seeds in each one of those pots and then another truly stunning woodland plant is the stillbees are really happy in our area they absolutely thrive they do spread pretty freely so if you wanted to keep them in a more contained space you might just want to consider having a border that is you know more beneficial for that where they’re a little bit more restrained but they are just so stunning i want them to be everywhere particularly this beautiful purple spired one that comes up in August for us it’s really a beautiful fernyl like ground cover and then the those spires just come up beautifully that one does like a little bit more water in the soil but that being said you know we have them all throughout the woodland and they are thriving and we have so many trees so that does show that they are a little bit more resilient in our area it’s probably because we do get a lot of winter like a lot of snow in the winter and then we get a lot of rain throughout the season so even though we have so many thirsty trees we are probably getting enough rain for them to get what they need get their fill and then you have things like aqualas aqualas or colbines are just so whimsical and romantic they are just the most beautiful butterflyshaped flowers they look like I don’t know fairies dancing in the wind they’re gorgeous and they have so many interesting by colors and we have several areas i’m looking out in the garden as we speak and there’s this area where we have some pink and and creamy white uh colines and another area where we have some blue and white colines but they are just beautiful they will spread freely in some areas not so much in our area but uh but they are really really gorgeous and the wild ones do seem to spread but the the storebought ones seem to stay pretty contained for us but it’s just fun to have that color so if you have these kind of different shapes and colors of foliage maybe a really beautiful fountain like fern with maybe some bara heart-shaped brunner and then larger broadleafdas next to that with some hakana cloa Japanese forest grass maybe the areola variety just sort of puddling underneath kind of creating a yellow soft yellow river underneath and then just sprink sprinkling some beautiful color in there whether that’s with annuals bianials or perennial flowers and then for some brighter foliage impact you can use hukras hookas offer a beautiful just vibrant punch of color I love the Shanghai hookah it’s a little bit on the darker side but that one has like sort of a purpley color and then a silver overlay on it and it just the veining really pops it’s really beautiful the underside of the leaves are sort of a burgundy color it’s just a really gorgeous hooka but there are beautiful red hookas that you can find we have se several of those in in our garden tiarellas are fantastic they offer that spring bloom that lasts for so long it’s one of our longest flowering early perennials and it has stood up so beautifully to this deluge of rain that we’ve been getting that’s been taking down so many of our other flowers and those have just stood up even though they’re so small and dainty and they look like they couldn’t stand a breath of air let alone this outpouring of rain but they are just so so stunning that’s another one and you can get some with beautiful leaves that have a softer green on the interior or silvery color and then broaden out to a deeper richer green really really beautiful you could do hookarellas which is a combination of the tiarella and the hooker so you can kind of get the best of both worlds the hooker blooms are so gorgeous i absolutely love them the spearmint hooka has a silvery green leaf and then this beautiful like hot pink vibrant spires of very ethereal flowers just gorgeous you could also do things like a carax you could do kolas kolus is an annual they have so many different vibrant rich foliage colors that you could add into your borders just to have those pops of color and interest particularly if you have a woodland garden that’s up a hill like we have just spreading those throughout so that your eye kind of keeps going as if it goes on forever and now planting amongst roots and in dry shade and a few tips on how to do it to best effect so shade beneath trees often comes with thirsty roots and lean soil but don’t let this deter you because there are things that you can do to encourage your plants and also to help them along the way so think like a forest choose resilient companions and then really plant in pockets of compost or leaf mold which is perfect for this kind of shady garden because it mimics the natural flow and rhythm and soil of a woodland as those trees rot down over time it’s creating a layer of leaf mold right so if we just add onto that and encourage more of that that’s a fantastic way of mulching your woodland borders and also layering your mulch so that you have these different levels so maybe you know a layer of compost a layer of your soil and then having leaf mold on the top is a wonderful way to mimic the way that the woodland floor naturally composes the soil and my next tip for dry shade is to water deeply but infrequently and this really trains your plants to really reach down with their roots to anchor in and also to find that water deeper down and next up for your romantic woodland garden it’s time to add whimsy we want a whimsical garden so let’s add some whimsy into this space and because these areas can be a little bit darker it’s nice to add pops of brighter pieces to really allow them to stand out in a border highlighting the features of whatever you’re putting in so for example if you’re putting in an an urn in a dark corner having it be a beautiful bright or light color is a fantastic way of really highlighting it putting it on display even if you’re tucking it back away it’s going to stand out in those darker corners whereas if you put something that’s a little bit darker it’s going to completely fade away and disappear and this part is really where your spirit enters the garden you know an old teacup turned into a bird bath a crooked gate that’s leading into a meandering woodland path a piece of statuary maybe a woodland nymph that’s just sort of rising above the ferns i mean there’s something about that weaving of wild and cultivated that makes a woodland garden feel so special and this is really where you can personalize it and make it your own do you love a little fairy garden that would be perfect for a little woodland dell do you love having gorgeous romantic kind of classical statuary that’s fantastic for a woodland garden there are beautiful things that can climb up it even your wild or native species might be climbing up it so we’re not only adding whimsical and personal touches we’re also inviting nature in so these garden spaces they’re not pristine they’re not perfectly clipped to within an inch of their life they’re really that call to nature saying it’s okay that we’re here together so this is where you know birds freely nest this is where foxes might come through we have a family of foxes that just is so beautiful we’ve seen their babies and they just come through the garden this is where chipmunks love to burrow and squirrels like to dance among the highest of the treetops it’s such a magical space hummingbirds like to rest and bumblebees like to sleep in the flowers so with that comes all of the things of life in a garden and we just have to be a little bit more relaxed a little bit looser in order to feel that sense of peace and serenity that a woodland garden can provide when we’re going through maybe our veggie patch let’s say or a formal garden there is this this call for structure in in a formal garden you know a French garden let’s say that precision that specificity those beautiful lines the vistas that you’re creating so intentionally those sort of start to soften in a woodland garden you can still have a beautiful formal woodland garden for sure you could create something like that an amalgamation but the natural rhythm of a woodland garden is one that es and flows it’s really about being part of the season paying attention to what’s happening what birds and wildlife are coming in with each passing month it’s just a very special very very magical place where you are in collaboration with nature so that might mean that maybe you’re leaving a stack of logs in the background so that hedgehogs or chipmunks can find a cozy little nesting spot maybe you’re creating a a little brush pile for hummingbirds and other other beautiful winged friends to to gather for their nests maybe are even putting out hummingbird nests or baskets or leaving birch branches and things like that so that they can peel off the white birch and create their beautiful little thimbleized nests so maybe that means that you want to take an old barrel and create a a a little sunken pond maybe this means that you want to put out a bird bath for cardinals to take a little soak in maybe it means that you just leave parts of the garden for the wild and you create a space that’s intermingled but generally this is an opportunity for you to let the wild in and to get closer to these beautiful woodland friends seasonal moments spring this time of year brings prim roses and pulmonaria brunner and epimediums summer welcomes in the fox gloves with their beautiful spires alongside the shorter spires of the stillbees autumn scatters those leaves like golden confetti and even winter brings in the berries and the gorgeous shapes of the trunks a woodland garden really needs very little pruning very little trimming it’s more about kind of gently guiding your plants deadheading where you need to composting generously and really stepping lightly [Music] okay so we have this beautiful woodland garden with this crumbling romantic old stone wall it’s like this beautiful woodland garden in the ruins so right off the bat my husband chose this one for us so I’m just taking it all in we have these very architectural trees there’s that mist that I talked about just sort of whispering its way through the woods it’s really gorgeous we don’t have the leaves fully on the trees yet so pretty early on but we’re going to design it as if this is in its full flush and with this program we’re going to be putting things in that might not be flowering at the same time necessarily we might put in some early spring bloomers with some that bloom a little bit later but typically most of these shade lovers will bloom earlier in the season in the springtime a lot of them your pulmonaras your brunner your stillbees things like that so let’s jump right in i think I want to keep this with just the main trees not too many shrubs or or smaller statured trees but I think I do want to put in one dogwood one cornice so let’s add that in and let’s do a really beautiful structural dogwood dogwoods are also native to the northeast we have some wild dogwoods growing and they’re really beautiful so I think I want to do one that looks very wild and that just sort of sort of looks like it’s just natural here something that has that tiered branch effect a lot of our native dogwoods here have that effect and it just looks so magical it looks like there’s a little bit of a break in the trees here so we’ll put that one there you just want to make sure that when you’re planting up any garden that you’re giving the plants what they want and some of these shrubs are going to do better if they have a few little moments of sunlight so it’s not deep full shade let’s put you right there and I think to balance it out I might do one over here as well the same one just a little bit larger here in the front so kind of have that coming out of this side yeah I think that that’ll look really nice now let’s start to add some of our gorgeous perennials i want to start with just a few on the right hand side and I’m going to do them in suedes we’ll start with Brera one of my favorites and we’ll do it in bloom this is the Jack Frost it’s just stunning there’s just something so magical about woodland plants i think if you have a cottage garden or a cottage style and you’re putting in woodland plants it’s just it’s such a perfect marriage all right I like that so a little cluster of those there kind of closer to us and then I want to add in some structure now I want to see if we can find sort of an old English bench something that looks weathered oh we should definitely do something in that wall all right i think something about having those stones in place makes me want to put in some kind of a stone piece of statuary or furniture but I don’t want it but none of these are quite right i would like more of a darker kind of gray stone instead of this sandstone color but we might have to work with what we have here yeah that’s all right so we’ll do this but let’s just imagine together let’s suspend disbelief here and imagine that this is a really beautiful one that matches that all right now let’s find something for this wall i think this wall just needs something ornamental something structural okay i found more of a gray stone bench and I added these little stone steps here that are going to kind of be hidden from the bottom but I like this idea that you’re kind of coming into this space that there’s sort of an introduction into the space that this angle that we’re looking at it from is the angle of the entrance of this garden and then I’m going to try and find something to put on that back wall even if it’s not perfect just something even as a placeholder that we can use slightly turned this florally might be nice but something like that but just that feels a little bit more organic crumbly would be nice to kind of go with this these ancient walls kind of feel to it all right and that’s a nice little bird bath to invite our bird friends in there okay so that’s some structure that we have there and now instead of doing a stone a pa pathway or anything like that or bricks um we’ll imagine that it’s been tread so many times that those bricks are all gone and we’ll we’ll just sort of create the path in the blank spaces so I’m gonna invite in some other things i think I definitely want to do one more shrub i want to do a hydrangeanger but I want to do a very woodland style like a lace cap hydrangeanger something or an oak leaf or a climber a climbing hydrangeanger would be really pretty they just look so ethereal and gorgeous so we could do almost like a a baby one a little baby climbing hydrangeanger climbing up here behind our cornice so that’s climbing up that back wall so eventually it’ll be kind of all covered and it’ll reach for the sun and it’ll just create this really nice architectural interest there i want to do a few really beautiful plants let’s start with some epimediums yeah let’s do a few of the sulfuriums it’s a nice red foliage those are nice around the base of trees and they have those beautiful bishop hats in the springtime gorgeous fairylike sprays of flower usually creamy whites or pinks there we go so we’ll do a few of those at the base of that tree that looks nice just like a nice bright pop we’ll do a few of these niviums epimedium nivium renivium and let’s say we pop these around the base of these other trees so they have that gorgeous foliage throughout the year and then in the springtime typically they have these gorgeous sprays of of fairylike flowers there we go and these will bloom at the same time all right i think I want to add one more hydrangeanger we’ll do this which looks like an oak leaf really beautiful and have that just kind of spraying out from behind this is going to be one that would not bloom at this time but very very beautiful it wouldn’t be blooming simultaneously with the cornice but that’ll give you that later interest and very pretty really interesting and I think having that behind the bench will be really nice i want to add in some pulmonary lung wart we’ll do this pink one here i just love the leaves of the lung wart i think they provide such interesting kind of structure to them so we’ll put those there during the season and I’ll kind of flank that that’s the stairs with those these runner need to be much smaller to scale i think a deep purple pulmonary area kind of right here next to our brera would be nice beautiful i want to put some hostas in here and I think I want to do some really nice blue foliage for the hostas and I think I’d like to have those maybe on either side of this stone bench i don’t want anything to stand out too much i don’t want things to feel too plunked i want things to feel like they would just end up there and then I really want to do some beautiful ferns yeah like ostrich ferns mhm maiden hair ferns are my favorite i definitely want some of these that have these beautiful plumes just this gorgeous fountains of interest floating up let’s add some beautiful maiden hair fern grows wild here and it’s just beautiful let’s add some of that over here it kind of spills you know it’s usually very wide and it kind of spills it’s very pretty like the difference of that foliage texture just very sprawled out and those ferns really do they gleam in the darker corners of a woodland garden so here in Vermont we have aers native aers and they’re in the woodlands they grow profusely on our property they come up in about August that would be beautiful to kind of pepper in with our oakleaf hydrangeanger which would bloom be in bloom at the same time but I’m not seeing any that are as they kind of come up in these individual branches a lot of these seem a little bit thicker which kind of takes away the look that I’m going for like this says New England Astra but it’s very close together so we’ll skip out on that great let’s do some Japanese anemmones anemmones and we’ll pop those in throughout now you know what if we wanted to do this without those pulmonaria and kind of keep it softer colors actually think that would be really really pretty as well we’re going to add some of this beautiful cranes this geranium we’ll do another geranium and we’ll have that a little drift here let’s add some of this Canadian coline this is the one that we have here we’re very close to Canada so a lot of their natives grow wild here like the Canadian windflower and this coline so this has a richer color and it has that really kind of wispy foliage and very ephemeral ethereal looking flowers that just kind of float on the breeze yeah I think it’s looking really nice and you can kind of see the trajectory of the path kind of winding around the back of that tree but let’s emphasize it now I just want to add in some some of these primulas i think they’re very beautiful and I think they have a really interesting look in the garden they’re just such a fun spot in the spring garden and you know what most of these are going to be blooming together so that’s fun i really like that i think it would be really fun and very elegant and elevated to do all white uh flowers in here like if they had a white geranium a crane spill but let’s add some more white flowers let’s add some trilliums let’s see if they have any yeah not very likely no trilliums trilliums are so beautiful they grow wild here as well and they are just so beautiful such an interesting shape all right let’s add our still bees then and we’ll we’ll add some that we can sort of count on for some of those blooms later on so some still bees are great because you can get varieties that’ll kind of cover you throughout the year they’ll they’ll kind of bloom throughout which is really fun we have a couple of varieties that are white and kind of creamy almost like a soft pale yellow and those bloom early in the spring for us and then we have some that are purple kind of like a lavender purple and they bloom in about August that’s nice i think a moon garden is so perfect for a woodland theme so if you wanted to do a moon garden and you’re just wondering if it’ll work in your space or how that’ll go I would highly recommend it if you have if you’re starting a woodland garden and you’ve always wanted to do a moon garden put those together because that would be so fun and then I’m going to do this heart and soul pink it’s a little more pink than our stillies are but that’s the vibe of them for sure is that kind of pinky purple very beautiful i’m going to pop those back there too i do want to add some auga just because it’s right out the window here and it looks so pretty but I’m not sure how this will look let’s see little swave of a juga right there so we’re just leaving those spaces open that we want to have open really using that concept of no space empty space blank space that’s used a lot in Japanese garden design kind of looking at the empty spaces and creating those as part of the the feel of the garden using those as kind of a guide it’s kind of like you’re filling in and working with the empty spaces anyway uh but I think that can be that can be a fun way to sort of think about this and now I want to come in with fox gloves saving the best for last i think I’m going to do white fox gloves and I really want them to just kind of tower over i want them to feel very abundant freckled throughout i’m going to do some of these purple ones common pink which look like a glocks and a flora fox glove violet colored fox glove this looks very much like kind of like the lavender fox gloves that we have here that I love to grow there we go i love the spires of flower of those fox gloves so fun i mean this is a very full full garden very full very romantic let’s imagine that these ones are coming out over here on this end there all right let me take a look i think that’s really nice i think I might want to add some ground cover right here let’s add some tiarelas you got tiarelas and hookas these don’t look that fun from this picture in person they’re so amazing i don’t love the flirtily on the on that but you get the idea of that just sort of a placeholder so I think it’s a really soft whimsical romantic space there are clusters and sways of plants but then also just a few freckled throughout as well combination of those can be really really fun a few anchoring plants you know the cornice obviously the trees and the and the the hardscape that’s in in place the old ruins gosh what a dream just provide that but then we added the hydrangeanger and just lots of beautiful woodland plants that are just going to look so at home and and peaceful and right in this space and it looks full and it looks vibrant but when you’re there it’ll just feel peaceful and together and cohesive and you can sort of still see and peek through beyond i like the teiered kind of um wedding cake look of that cornice so you can still see those misty woods beyond but yeah very very beautiful and then when you’re sitting on the bench you’re kind of enclosed with the hydrangeanger behind you and yeah very nice you can have a little intimate conversation on the stone bench in this romantic woodland setting let’s make this let’s make this on our property somewhere okay I think that’s [Music] all your woodland sanctuary awaits a woodland garden isn’t just a place it’s a feeling of stillness of softness and of wonder and it begins with a single plant a fox glove here a fern there let this little space become a poem one dainty flower one leaf one breath of shade at a time thank you so much for joining me please do like this video if you like this kind of garden design content and inspiration and until next time be well stay curious and may your garden always bring you home bye-bye [Music]