Like any creative discipline, gardening is subject to trends. Some are light-hearted, inspired by social media. Others are more serious, based on scientific research or careful observation of the environment. But one thing all these buzzwords have in common is they are based on a desire to garden in a way that is more sustainable, encouraging resilience in a changing climate, promoting biodiversity, and nurturing wildlife. The language around them may change as they become incorporated into the mainstream, but the ideas behind them seem set to stay.
Key garden trends that have influenced design in 2025
The garden mullet
Pioneered by David Bowie and Paul McCartney in the 1970s, favoured by footballers in the 1980s, and sung about by the Beastie Boys in the 1990s, the mullet hairstyle has enjoyed a revival in the 2020s as a way for Gen Z to express their individuality. Cropped on top and left to grow long behind, it has been described as “business at the front, party at the back”.
American garden designer Rebecca McMackin was the first to use the term to describe a style of gardening that involves creating neat edges as “cues to care”, while leaving wilder growth towards the back of a border. Mowing paths through long grass is a similar idea. “I coined the term just to be cute, but the practice is well worn and something people have been doing for ages,” says McMackin.
“When I was younger and working on crews, we'd visit a property and not have time to do everything, but would always remulch the edge of the beds, because that was the most visible to the client. They'd read the landscape differently with a clean edge. It says the land is cared for. In many more formal contexts, it's the hard edge that allows the wildness. Like a picture frame,” she adds.
The good news is that this time-saving approach is also better for wildlife and biodiversity. Rather than feeling obliged to rake up leaves and dispose of them elsewhere, you can simply push them to the back of a border, where they can act as a mulch without stifling precious plants.
Leaving seedheads over winter provides food for birds, then when you are ready to cut them back, you can ‘chop and drop’ rather than bagging them up. The key is to keep some areas manicured to provide visual contrast and show that the wildness is intentional. This could take the form of weeding and mulching the front of a border or strimming a patch of lawn, while leaving the rest to grow long.
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Sand gardens
Leading garden designers and horticulturists from Dan Pearson at Hillside to Tom Brown at West Dean are increasingly experimenting with growing in sand. The combination of low fertility and high drainage means plants are encouraged to put down roots without the need for irrigation. Sand also protects plants from extremes of summer heat and winter wet and cold. Plants grown this way are usually shorter, reducing the need for staking, and are more resilient against pests and diseases. The sand also acts as a mulch, suppressing weeds.
If you want to try making a sand garden at home, choose a sunny spot and lay down a layer of horticultural sand at least 10cm thick, but preferably around 20cm. Catmint, sea holly, helianthus and many grasses are all good plants for sand. When perennials die back at the end of the season, it is important to remove dead plant material, to prevent it from rotting down and turning the sand into soil.
Swedish plantsman Peter Korn is a pioneer of growing in sand at his garden and nursery near Malmö. Most of the beds here are mounded to create microclimates. They also raise plants in sand in the nursery as those grown in conventional potting compost can struggle to thrive when transplanted. Landscape designer Luke Coleman has worked with Korn and gone on to use sand gardening in his own projects. He says: “It clicked with what I’d seen in the wild – many of the most resilient plant communities thrive in low-nutrient, free-draining soils. It’s an approach that puts ecology first.”
“Sand beds are gaining momentum because slower growth encourages greater diversity, stronger root systems, and plants naturally more resilient to pests, diseases and climate extremes.” Coleman has had great success with prairie species such as Rudbeckia fulgida var. sullivantii ‘Goldsturm’, Baptisia australis and Liatris spicata, along with steppe plants such as salvias and stipas.
Chaos gardening
This is a trend that originated on TikTok and has made it all the way to RHS Chelsea. At its most basic, it describes the practice of taking leftover seed packets and scattering the contents willy-nilly on bare patches of earth. Results vary, and while some social media posts boast of cottage garden-style abundance, there has also been a backlash with reality check videos showing sparse growth from this ‘chaotic’ style of planting.
While this can be a great way to use up leftover seeds, it is worth putting in a bit of groundwork by weeding and raking over a patch of ground before sowing into it. Consider what seeds you are sowing, as native wildflowers and hardy annuals such as poppies and nigella will do better than seeds that require nurturing to start them off in life. Carrots are a favourite with chaos gardeners who scatter seeds in between other plants, but this will work best if you have fertile, stone-free soil.
At the more design-led end of the scale, chaos gardening has been used to describe plants apparently growing at random in a semi-abandoned landscape, although in practice they have been artfully arranged. In the Delos garden at Sissinghurst, Dan Pearson and his team have recreated a Mediterranean landscape, planting around fragments of columns and in crevices in the rock terraces, with the intention that over time, plants will self-seed and spread in the same way as the native phrygana Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson saw growing in the wild on the Greek island in 1935.
Wildlife stacks, dead hedges, and bug snugs
What started out as a gimmicky trend for ‘bug hotels’ has transformed into an acceptance of the need to share our spaces with insects, birds and small mammals and a realisation that this approach brings with it myriad benefits, from helping to keep pests under control to pollination.
While there are plenty of commercially available wildlife habitats from nesting boxes to hedgehog homes, the best blend into the natural environment. This can be as simple as leaving a stack of logs for minibeasts to make their homes in or following the example of Marian Boswall in her book The Kindest Garden and drilling holes into the ends of larger logs as a habitat for solitary bees.
Dead hedges are a great way of using up woody prunings by stacking them in between wooden posts dug into the ground, or simply laying them on top of one another to create shelter for wildlife. Or habitats can be more intentional such as Matt Somerville’s log-built hives for wild honeybees. Sand boxes are good for mining bees and solitary wasps and can be made from an old wine box. Drill a few holes into the side to let insects in, then fill with sand and place in a sunny spot, perhaps with a few herbs planted on top.
Boswall says: “A thriving garden ecosystem needs healthy soil and water, planting in layers, habitat and forage for birds and insects, but to be complete it will also need mammals. These might be field mice and shrews, increasingly rare harvest mice and hedgehogs, or badgers and foxes. A happy coexistence means finding your own balance between tidiness and tolerance. Cover and connectivity are the key needs, so establish areas of scrub to create habitat in larger spaces or create leaf and woodpiles in smaller gardens. Leave some longer grass and make piles of brash into dead hedges. These are best if contiguous with live hedgerows, to create safe corridors between forage hotspots and creatures’ homes.”
Polyculture
The practice of growing two or more crops together is not a new one. Humans have been growing this way for millennia, but it has enjoyed a revival in recent years as a response to damaging monocultures. Polyculture is a more ecological approach that mimics natural cycles, leading to healthier soil, reducing pest damage, increasing biodiversity, and producing better crop yields. Methods include mixed cropping and intercropping – growing plants in alternating rows. The ultimate polyculture is the forest garden, where edible and useful plants are grown in layers, from a canopy of trees and large shrubs to a mid-layer of smaller shrubs and perennial crops, then ground-cover plants.
At Birch Farm in Devon, Joshua Sparkes and his team grow a diverse range of edible plants together, embracing pests and even weeds, to supply fresh produce for the nearby Farmers Arms pub and the Collective at Woolsery. Favourite combinations include kale and chard, alternating taller and smaller plants, as well as long term crops such as brassicas and parsnips grown with medium term crops including beetroot and turnips, and quick turnaround salad crops. They keep weeds in check by cutting them back to the ground while crops are young, but never removing the roots as these are vital for soil health.
Regenerative gardening
“Regenerative gardening and design is a mindset – it's about learning from and working with nature's own cycles. It’s about understanding that we are all connected, from the soil to our guts to our spirits, and that by working together with nature we can nourish both people and the planet,” says Boswall. In her book The Kindest Garden, she outlines some of the best regenerative practices gardeners can adopt.
These include using organic, biodynamic and permaculture approaches, having a more mindful approach to materials and how we can reuse them rather than simply ripping them out and replacing them, as well as sharing learnings with other gardeners. There are many practical applications that come under this label from rotating vegetable crops and minimising digging, to planting fruit and nut trees, or using hedges and shrubs as windbreaks. Moving chicken coops around the garden to spread manure, using wormeries or bokashi bins to recycle kitchen scraps, making compost tea and using rainwater butts to conserve water all come under the heading of regenerative gardening.
Growing in plant communities
The idea of plant communities is to try to emulate plants as they grow in the wild, living together in one eco-system without any one species taking over. Plants can be either native or non-native but should be chosen to suit the location.
Garden designer Jack Wallington, who documents how he grows in plant communities in his exposed garden in Yorkshire at www.wildway.info says: “In its simplest form, a plant community is when plants grow together in happy competition with one another. More broadly, the term plant community comes from ecology, and it is the plant part of a wider ecosystem. For me, in gardens plant community design can use any plants but must draw inspiration from wild ecosystems, being dynamic and ever-changing.”
He talks about “happy competition” with one plant perhaps dominating one year to be replaced by another the next. If a particular species becomes too vigorous, his solution is to try to outcompete it with an evergreen, smothering plant such as hardy geraniums.
When starting out with this method of growing, Wallington advises coming up with a list of plants suited to the location, then choosing your favourites and starting with these. Begin with static plants such as evergreens or ornamental grasses for structure, then surround these with spreaders and ground cover. The aim is to have as few gaps as possible, which is better for wildlife and soil health.
For example, in a sunny spot in his own garden he has created a plant community with framework of switch grass (Panicum virgatum ‘Northwind’) and around that the snowy globes of Echinops sphaerocephalus ‘Arctic Glow’ as well as the waist high, primrose yellow Scabiosa columbaria subsp. ochroleuca, plenty of astrantias and a ground cover of Viola odorata and Viola cornuta which are happy in both sun and part shade.
Hydrozoning and xeriscaping
“Hydrozoning and xeriscaping both sit comfortably within the broader idea of growing in plant communities, but they add a crucial layer of functionality, connecting planting design to water availability and climate resilience,” says garden designer Tom Massey, who explores both concepts in his new book, Waterwise Garden (DK, out now). Hydrozoning is about grouping plants according to their water needs, so irrigation (if used) and watering can be more efficient, allowing planting to thrive naturally in balance with local conditions. This could include growing Mediterranean plants together, or those adapted to woodlands, prairies, meadows, or rocky slopes.
Xeriscaping takes that idea further, designing for minimal irrigation from the outset through soil selection or amendment, mulching, and the use of drought-tolerant species that originate from arid or semi-arid environments. These might include perennials such as achilleas, verbascums, salvias and echinops, grasses such as stipas and fescues and shrubs such as tree germanders (Teucrium fruticans), purple Jerusalem sage (Phlomis purpurea) and purple rock rose (Cistus x purpureus).
Massey explains: “These principles can be applied in domestic gardens with the caveat that you need to work with the existing conditions of the site. For example, if you have a shady, damp, north-facing garden, a xeriscaped, sun-loving scheme is not going to work. Hydrozoning, on the other hand, can be applied more broadly in almost any context.”
He adds: “Ultimately, both principles are about creating richly textured, ecologically resilient schemes that use water wisely — and I believe these can still be colourful, dynamic, biodiverse, and beautiful.”
