Fun & Whimsy Garden Design Ideas | Garden Home (104)

On this episode of Garden Home, host P. Allen Smith will discuss fun and whimsy garden design ideas. Allen will travel to California’s Bonfante Garden Theme Park to show you the most interesting circus trees and topiaries. From Garden Gnomes to kid friendly projects, Allen will show you the best ideas to have a fun garden home.

Topics Include
Bonfante Gardens Theme Park in California
Chatsworth England Fun Garden Features
Animals in the garden
Designing Fun Garden Features
Gnomes in the Garden
Flamingos in the Garden
Circus Trees
Topiary
Kid Friendly Projects
Bird Bath
Painting in the garden

_______
This video is made possible by the following sponsor.
(So go check them out!)

Gilbert H. Wild and Son – America’s Favorite Flower Farm and Nursery:

Home

________

P. Allen Smith is a landscape and garden designer, horticulturist, preservationist and television host. His passions span the subjects of community, health, sustainability and history. He has designed the grounds at many of the nation’s most notable estate properties, townhomes, and commercial complexes. And, for over 19 years, he has shared his green knowledge and insight with the public via ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, his own PBS television, and six book titles. Currently, Allen is focused on residential, commercial and community designs that are beautiful, improve our contentedness, and our social and physical health.

To learn more about:
…Allen’s horticultural interests and secrets, sign up for his weekly newsletter: https://pallensmith.com/

…visiting Allen’s Garden Home above the Arkansas River, see https://pallensmith.com/tours/

….Allen’s favorite plants mentioned in his social media, see: To review many of the plants Allen mentions in his posts and that are planted in his own garden, see https://pallensmith.com/gilbert-h-wild-allens-favorites/

….retaining Allen’s Garden and Landscape design firm, see http://www.pallensmithandassociates.com/

…Allen’s Garden Home-inspired intergenerational community in Monroe, LA, see https://www.gardensofsomerset.com/
—–

Want more Allen?
Allen’s Official Website: http://www.pallensmith.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pallensmith
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pallensmith/
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/pallen_smith/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/pallensmith

The garden is about beauty fantasy and fun over the past 20 years as a garden designer I’ve enjoyed helping homeowners create private sanctuaries full of beauty and wonder I find each garden to be a fresh opportunity to explore ways to create uniquely personal spaces these are just

A few of the gardens I’ve helped to transform into garden hose Hi I’m Allen Smith welcome to the garden home today’s show is all about having fun now when I think about having fun in the garden this place always comes to mind it’s a theme park dedicated to exceptional horticulture and good garden design with fantasy and fun at every turn

Welcome to Bonfante Gardens theme park in Gilroy California our garden home for much of today’s show here we’ll be dazzled by these mind-bending circus trees and humorous topiaries but we’ll have more on these a little later you know for me as a garden designer the gardens that have been the most

Memorable have been those that have had a sense of humor so in today’s show I thought we’d explore how to have a little fun or whimsy in the garden let’s take a look at my garden home one way I have fun is through the animals and insects that call my garden their home

You know the garden is about a lot more than just beautiful flowers and plants it’s really about life I’m always trying to attract different forms of life to my garden now we’re all familiar with attracting butterflies and birds they add so much grace and color over the years I’ve discovered that the garden

Can become even more alive by employing the help of some little garden helpers like these Bantam chickens these are the pint-sized members of the chicken family since they’re so small they really can’t do much damage to the garden they also provide benefits like eliminating insects and well their droppings can

Certainly make my plants grow and they’re just a lot of fun to have around to watch now let’s take a look at another garden helper that’s just as colorful goldfish are some of the easiest garden pets to care for it’s much more convenient for me to keep them

In my garden pool rather than an aquarium or fish bowl and what a service they provide the mosquito larvae and their waste fertilizes my water plants and if you have a water feature you might consider keeping a few ducks around they can be a lot of fun for

Children and they’ll also eat slugs snails and even Japanese beetles and of course who could forget the honeybee I don’t guess you can really call them pets but what a benefit they provide to my garden in the way of pollination and of course the delicious honey This wacky notion of enjoying chickens in the garden isn’t new in fact during a visit to one of England’s grandest estates I enjoyed talking about this whimsical passion for poultry with the Duchess of Devonshire who’s raised chickens at Chatsworth for over 50 years speaking to the idea of having some fun

With the garden I think one of the things for me that I enjoy the most about the garden is the the chicken pen to one side with those wonderful pullets and cockerels bouncing around in there I’ve heard those chickens everywhere yeah I think I think our gardener Ziona

Gardener who would allow chickens in his garden but he’s he’s sort of used to him so he doesn’t matter but the the Cotton’s are all right I don’t like getting their feathers wet I think they’re one of the most humorous of the breeds because he looks like they’re

Wearing pajamas running across the law well they’re doing deed they look amazing and people stop and think goodness got out somewhere sometimes they try and put them back in the course act completely free they can go where they like having chickens here that’s your idea I’ve always had

Chickens in has been lost without them now chickens aren’t the only fun elements in the gardens at Chatsworth the willow tree fountain was first planted if you will in 1692 water shoots from the branches and leaves often to the surprise or even enjoyment of passing visitors this type of practical

Joke is called a Joe Cody aqua or water joke from the Italian Renaissance in the winter it’s difficult to tell the difference between the real tree and its Pretender the Princess Victoria the future Queen of England was delighted by this prank when she visited Chatsworth at age 13 another fun garden at

Chatsworth to visit is the cottage garden it contains many topiary that are shaped like furniture you might find in a cottage there’s a bedroom up the stairs with a bed nightstands and lamps a table is set with a begonia tablecloth and of course a fireplace complete with

A floral fire and no visit to Chatsworth would be complete without splashing about in the centuries-old cascade waterfall like they’re having a lot of fun doesn’t it I mentioned earlier this idea of the old Italian water joke well several years ago on a trip to Italy had an opportunity to experience this firsthand

I was out looking at Gardens with some Italian friends and we went to the villa Torre Gianni I should have known something was up when they told me to go ahead of them and explore the garden while they held back and I moved into the garden suddenly water sprang up from

Unknown places completely soaking me well they had a good laugh about it it was humour Italian Renaissance style speaking of joking around in the garden I got to have some fun with nel Newman daughter of actors Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward Nellore accounted a story about a favorite childhood pet his backyard

Antics got both of them in trouble with Nels mom since you’re interested in chickens I’ll send you some I’ve got a chicken house full I hear they used to raise him as a kid we had to New Hampshire Reds Dorothy I had four years but she did have a bad

Habit of sitting on the back stoop and pooping on the back stoop and my mother got very good things not a good thing my mother got very upset with me because I didn’t keep after her and so finally she took Dorothy off to stew Leonard’s grocery store which also had a little

Farm yard Oh No which I was heartbroken and I can’t remember what I did to redeem myself but finally mom said well okay you can have Dorothy back so it had been weeks and I went back to sue Leonard’s and there was there are 40 chickens there and probably half of them

Are New Hampshire reds and I called out Dorothy and I had no idea where she was and she clocked a couple of times and came out of the flock right up to you and then continued her bad behavior at home but it was okay she’d been forgiven and so died

I believe that the garden is a place where we can reconnect to a sense of childlike wonder and enchantment one of the best ways to do this is introduce an element of fun or whimsy into the garden you see I believe that whimsy is an important element of design in fact it’s

One of the 12 principles of design that I use when I create a garden home now the idea behind the garden home is simply to expand our living spaces beyond the interior of the home to the boundaries of our property now certainly in a garden like this there are plenty

Of examples of using humor or whimsy although the scale may not fit exactly to our home landscapes there are some ideas here that we can use A garden room is enclosed with walls and these walls can be a hedge or the side of a building or a fence or even a low border of plantings it’s decorated with plants that bring color texture pattern and rhythm to the room just as paint fabrics and furnishings bring these

Elements into the rooms of our home I like to create Windows and entries in garden rooms that frame the views beyond and also give a garden room a focal point you’re probably familiar with visiting a garden and seeing statuary that attracted your eye but focal points

Don’t have to be serious they can be fun garden ornaments I’ve gathered together some garden ornament with a sense of humor now we’re familiar with all of these we’ve seen them around the gnome the gazing ball and of course the pink flamingos now don’t roll your eyes and think oh

How tacky all of these have interesting histories now let’s start with the gnome first now if you believe in gnomes you know that gnomes have been around for thousands and thousands of years they come from Scandinavia and lower but they became popular in British gardens in the

1860s you could find them in fashionable gardens from Scotland to Cornwall and soon after enthusiasm for these little guys spread throughout this country now I’ve learned from those who know about gnomes that they are 7 times stronger than a man they can run 35 miles an hour

And their eyesight is better than a hawk and if they really like you they’ll hang out in your garden and your house and help you with chores I’m hoping a few will hang out here and help me do some weeding now let’s take a look at gazing

Balls now this object is also rooted in European history this time Venice you see since the 1300s the Venetians have been known for their beautiful objects created out of blown glass it was in the 15th century when a priest called these spheres of light but just like the gnomes the gazing ball

Didn’t become popular until the Victorians got a hold of it now they considered these to be symbols of prosperity and good luck to have them in garden well it brought good fortune another name for the gazing ball is the witches ball now the reason for this

Name is it was believed that this ball would actually keep witches away from your garden because you see a witch can’t bear to see her own reflection now enough of these ideas that came from Europe let’s take a look at an American phenomena that started in the 1950s the

Inspiration for the pink flamingos was Florida resorts and the use of plastic for just about everything you see a company called Union products began to develop a line called plastics for the lawn which included a dog a frog a duck and pink flamingos see the only problem

With them at least initially was that they were only two-dimensional then they hired a young artist by the name of Don Featherstone to create three-dimensional objects he first tried a duck and then the Flamingo for which he’s famous the Featherstone flamingos remained popular today in fact the artist is quoted as

Saying before plastics only rich people could afford poor taste well the Flamingo certainly has its place in American history these were stuck in my garden as a surprise as a practical joke you might say I’ve been flamingo now I can return the favor and stick them in someone else’s garden so

You better watch out it might be yours you here at Minh fonti gardens in Gilroy California they take gardens and fun seriously you see this particular theme park is actually based on a collection of trees called the circus trees that were developed in the early 1940s now

This is an example of one of them called the four-legged giant it’s actually four Sycamore trees that have been grafted together to form a single trunk Michael bunt font type owner of Bonfante Gardens tells us more well in the early 80s we got into the nursery business kind of as a fluke but

In the course of doing that I developed a real passion for trees and then as time passed the opportunity in 83 to acquire these trees came came to came delight and we thought it would be a real tool for us to share our passion for trees and use this as a focal point

Because they had a tremendous amount of interest to the to the public so we fortunately hadn’t in several years it took us to acquire these trees learned how to dig big trees ourselves and we went over and took plenty of time took two years to dig these trees and we dug

Them out and coordinated the effort to get him to Gilroy the biggest problem of moving big trees you have to find a route to be able to bring these and that was the process that you physically have to go out and measure each bridge and measure each power line and determine

This route how did this artist go about creating these fantastic shapes palak’s alerts and started playing around with trees in about 1927 he was really a self-taught surveyor by trade but had this uncanny desire to play around with trees and he through a process of grafting and bleaching as the basis that

We can understand that he did it and a lot of secret techniques that he developed that he never shared with anybody to create these special trees and he did that and and had many special designs this group of sycamores is one of his I think mid-span developments and

He had developed some skills that he thought would allow him to put multiple trees on a multiple plane and create all these different connections and he didn’t have as much success as he had later on because the tree after this he he did was much more ice inaccurate and I believe that he

Learned things by doing what he did to this tree or this group of trees to be able to apply it to the next tree they did so he had to learn these techniques along the way there was no manual for him to follow no absolutely not it was

Just a god-given inner talent that he had developed and the skills he learned from surveying only gave him ideas and ability to create forms to try to shape the trees in the shape that he wanted them but the actual biological processes that he developed were absolutely self-taught and from an experimental basis Well we’ve seen how the circus trees are an example of how the hand of man can craft nature into amazing forms another example is the topiary an art form that we’ve been enjoying for hundreds of years where trees and shrubs are crafted into amazing shapes and forms limited

Only by your imagination topiary can be as complex as these animals at Bonfante Gardens or as simple as a clipped boxwood in a container you see all topiary means is to clip or to trim live trees and shrubs even vines into decorative shapes and forms simple geometric shapes are always popular for

Topiary and in a way the classic really looks like a Christmas tree and it’s during the holiday season we tend to bring nature inside which I think completes this idea of the garden home the magic of the season and the interest in topiary just seemed to go together in

Fact for topiary expert Mike Fagel the holiday season keeps him really busy just walk me through the process and creating topiary well we propagate all our own cuttings to get our own plants and so from that point which takes between six weeks and two months then moves into another

Greenhouse where it is spaced and is allowed to grow and once it’s reached the proper size will train it onto a wire frame whatever one that is and generally speaking the ivy then needs to get fixed two to three more times before the plant is ready to sell well Mike I’m

Sure that these topi are very popular at Christmas yes it is our busiest time of the year and I would like to say that it was a complete madhouse around here but we’re so well organized that we managed to keep all everything under control well not everyone can say that about

Christmas I’ll tell ya these are wonderful yes this is a very popular item it’s a new one for us and it did very well last Christmas and it does well during the rest of the year because it can be used for many sure many locations but it has that classic

Christmas tree shade right By now you’re probably wondering how you can add a little fun and whimsy to your own garden home well there are lots of different ways you can do this but one of my favorites is to create an illusion to defy logic if you will for instance

You can take a concrete mask like this one I picked up at a local garden center and you can suspend that in a living hedge like this it makes a wonderful focal point and visitors are always walking by and saying how did you get that concrete mask to stay in place in

The hedge well it’s really quite simple all you have to use is one of these Shepherd’s hooks which are commonly used for suspending or hanging bird feeders all now the tricky part is getting this hook inside the head you just have to have patience and ease it in there the

Idea is that you don’t want to see the hook at all now with the hook positioned in the hedge it’s just time to hang the mask and I’ve just tied a wire on the back as you can see here it just simply hooks on like that when you select your

Mask or plaque make sure it’s lightweight it’ll hang better on the hedge this is a great way to add a little whimsy in the garden Certainly fun and children go together think back when you were a child what was it about the garden that captured your imagination was it seeing your first plant to grow or gathering flowers with your grandmother are going to the local pumpkin patch and picking out just the right pumpkin we’re bigger was

Always better just take a look at this whopper weighing in at almost a thousand pounds you know there’s something about pumpkins that just grabs our imagination in the fall of the year we use them in so many different ways children around Halloween love to paint and carve them

Now another member of the pumpkin family which is equally delightful is the gourd Agra gourds when I was a kid it was a lot of fun you see all you need to grow these is full Sun well-drained soil and a lot of room because gourd vines are rampant growers today the gourd is

Pretty useless no longer do we need them as storage vessels or for tools such as dippers the gourd is really relegated to the area of delight and fun in the garden they’re meant to be just playful objects one of the things I like to do with them is just to score them as

They’re growing with at the end of a nail if you just scratch the skin as the gourd matures that incision will expand and you can create interesting designs on them once they dry you can polish them with shoe polish or some sort of lacquer that’s another fast growing seed that you can

Plant that will delight children our moon flower vines and morning glories if you really want to get a child interested in the garden give them a little space they can call their own I found that raised beds work very well for this it’s a contained area that they

Can put their signature on quite literally in fact it’s fun to have them plant their initials and flowers like marigolds and to grow things that are fun and interesting like herbs and squash and tomatoes now another way to get children excited about the garden is to feed the birds hummingbirds are one

Of the most delightful of garden visitors they’re always clowning around the feeders if you’d like to try hummingbirds to your garden take a look at this Choosing the best plants for your garden can be a bewildering experience in the spring when you consider how much garden centers and nurseries have to choose from how tall is a particular plant grow does it take Sun or shade does it flower these are all questions and they seem to

Go on and on but I have one more criteria you may want to consider does the plant attract hummingbirds I realize this may not be the most important question to answer unless of course you’re looking at it from the hummingbirds perspective but by choosing certain plants you can actually increase

The chances of having these little acrobats of the garden around whether they’re annuals perennials tropicals or vines the hummingbird will find something to sip nectar from in all categories I planted this honeysuckle about four years ago on my front fence and it’s one of the first things to

Flower in the spring that really get the hummingbirds attention they go for these scarlet coral colored flowers they love the tubular shape coral honeysuckle or sometimes refer to as scarlet honeysuckle is actually an American native vine and it’ll really turn their heads among the annual flowers you might think about planting there’s Morning

Glory red salvia and even petunias perennials that are always a favorite include the blooms of hosta tannaz pence Timmons and bee balm these are just a few of the plants I’ve grown to entice and feed Hummers this spring when you’re making additions to your garden don’t forget about the hummingbirds you

As we’ve just seen hummingbirds can bring a certain enchantment if not magic to the garden home but what about other birds like songbirds well I’m always trying to figure out easy ways to attract them to my garden and one way is to create a birdbath using some very

Ordinary materials take a look at this the design starts with two 10-inch clay pots now you can use some old ones like I’m using here that may have a crack or chip in them or you can pick up some new ones at your local garden center you

Simply take these and stack one on top of the other now for the basin for the birdbath just use a large saucer this is a terracotta saucer that I just place right in the center like that there you have it a birdbath now to finish it off I’ll use this wonderfully expressive

Rooster that was created by a young friend of mine and art class it’ll go right in the center and this will give the birds a place to to perch and roost and son while they play in the water here in the basin this is a very simple

Idea for the garden home and what I like about it most of all besides its simplicity is that I’m using all natural materials you see I think the Terra Cotta blends in beautifully with the garden last year I used this birdbath next to some globe amaranth and that

Wonderful tilt awhirl coleus the terra cotta and orange colors in the leaves echoed the color of the birdbath this project is a simple and easy way to add a touch of whimsy or light heartedness to your garden home now if you don’t have a fun rooster like this to put in

The middle of your birdbath just check out your local garden center I’m sure you’ll find something that’ll work just as well Creating a garden home is about a lot of things certainly mine allows me to reconnect with nature grow some of my own food and just enjoy the beauty of flowers and wildlife but it’s also a place for me to have some fun and enjoy some of the things that that I really

Get into like painting I can’t tell you how much pleasure it brings me to come out into my garden and put up my easel and begin painting various scenes I also enjoy inviting my friends to paint with me the garden should be a place for us to enjoy a wide range of outdoor

Activities whether it’s playing with children out on the lawn or places where you can have a wide range of pets whether it’s the conventional cat or dog or something a little less conventional like ducks or chickens or even goldfish the garden home can be a place to revisit your childhood by putting a

Model train in your back garden these are just a few examples of how the garden home can amuse and delight us hoping today’s show you’ve been inspired to come up with some fun ways to enjoy your garden even more from the garden home I’m allen Smith more information

About today’s topic and other topics covered in this series can be found at P Allen smith.com on an upcoming episode of PL on Smith’s garden home Hi I’m allen Smith join me on a tour of some of the grandest gardens in the world we’ll see why scale is important to a garden get tips on creating a classic English border learn how an artist viewfinder can show us how to frame of you it’s a half-hour of Gardens

You won’t want to miss You