Design Knot Gardens

Series Summary

Landscaping the front or back yard doesn't have to be a professional job. Home gardens provide a tranquil area for reflection and relaxation. Tending and enjoying a garden can lower blood pressure, ease anxiety and provide diversion in which to ponder various thoughts that have been lingering in the subconscious. Even with limited yard space, planting a small corner garden is a simple task that can be completed in just an afternoon. In this free video series on garden and lawn care, a sustainable gardener discusses maintaining an outdoor living space. Find out how to prune various plants and trees, and get information on keeping a lawn weed-free and healthy. Learn to grow a vegetable garden in the yard or on a patio, and find out which plants thrive indoors. Grow greenery indoors and out using this helpful gardening guide.

Video Transcript

"Hi this is Yolanda Vanveen, and in this segment we're going to talk about, how to design a knot garden, how to design knot gardens. Knot gardens have a long history. And back in the day, the royal families in England and France and other parts of Europe would have a knot garden. And a knot garden basically is used with either herbs or boxwood or any kind of hedge material, and they would just grow them in a row right next to each other to create kind of a knot design, and a lot of it is very ornate and very beautiful. But when you're growing a knot garden in your own garden, the theory is that you should start small and then work to large, because they do take time to maintain and time to design and you want to select herbs that are going to stay on the small side, and you trim everything just perfectly so that they stay in the knot design. So if you have a large area space you can go very ornate, and you have a lot of time to work on it, you can have a really ornate knot garden. But if you just have a small yard you can still use the same theories of knot gardens just to have a nice little herb garden. And so when you're planting your herbs or your boxwoods, you only plant them maybe 6 inches to a foot apart and zig-zag them, and place them in a geometric pattern, and that way when they grow in, from the air, they look like a beautiful design of knots. And the whole point was for people to look at them from a higher level, like from the castle out into the garden or from the air. And so less is more with a knot garden. You can have it just surrounding your herb garden or you can create a knot garden out of herbs themselves. But you just place them so that when they grow, they create a knot. And intermix silver foliage with green foliage so that it looks even better. And so you can find all kinds of designs on-line, or you can just start your design yourself. And it's easiest just to make a graph with squares and decide what type of design you'd like to make and then purchase the plants to put into your squares and then that way as they fill in you can have a beautiful knot garden to showcase your plants."