If you’re looking to design a yard that’ll be right at home in one of our best cities for vampires, a gothic garden is the perfect way to bring your personality into your landscape. It’s easy to learn how to build a goth garden by incorporating Victorian influences and dramatic plants to create a gothic paradise.
What is a goth garden?
Modern-day goth gardens are inspired by Victorian gothic gardens, a design trend that emphasized themes of death and romanticism. Today, these positively ghoulish gardens create a unique aesthetic with antique influences and striking flowers.
Goth gardens may be spooky, but they’re usually more of a year-round landscaping centerpiece than a Halloween decoration scheme.
How to create a goth garden
Goth gardens combine plants, hardscaping, and even local wildlife to create a spooky ambiance. These garden ideas will create the perfect ambiance in your gothic garden.
Use spooky plants
The perfect goth garden mix has to be full of black plants and dark foliage. Dahlias, tulips, and evergreen hellebores come in shades of deep purple, red, black, and white, a perfect color palette for a gothic setting. The striking blooms of deep red bleeding hearts and Dracula celosia are a unique centerpiece, while carnivorous plants add function and fear.
Looking for a ground cover that’s a little more goth than plain old grass? Moss provides a low-maintenance lawn with an eerie flair, while creeping phlox will coat your landscape in bone-white flowers.
You may thrive by the light of the moon, but for your goth garden to thrive, you’ll need plants that suit your lawn’s light conditions. Bleeding hearts and hellebores love the shade, while Dracula celosia will only turn blood-red in full sun. Try mapping the sunlight in your yard to determine what the best options are for your goth garden.
Add an herbalist touch with edible plants
Goth gardens often feature elements of cottage gardens – particularly an emphasis on edible plants for snacking, soothing sickness, or spellcasting. Hollyhocks come in gorgeously gothic black and purple and have historically been brewed into an anti-inflammatory tea, while delicate dark pansies can be candied or eaten straight off the stem.
Bring nocturnal interest with a moon garden
Why create a goth garden if there won’t be anything blooming during your moody midnight strolls? A moon garden adds a luminous touch to your goth garden design with nighttime blooms and white flowers. Classic petunias add an elegant flair, while moonflowers will bask in the moonlight.
Moon gardens will also attract spooky nocturnal pollinators like moths and bats, who have recently been found to play a vital role in the garden after honeybees and butterflies have gone to bed. Plant flowers that release their scent in the evening to draw them in.
Incorporate Victorian decor
Pay homage to your goth garden’s Victorian inspiration with hardscaping accents like wrought iron arches and trellises with climbing vines. Fantasy-inspired statuary accents like gnomes, gargoyles, and miniature fairy gardens help create a gothic ambiance.
Invite nighttime guests with bat houses
No goth garden is complete without a few bats in the belfry. Bat houses are a great addition, coming in styles that range from naturalistic wood to tiny Victorian homes. As a plus, providing shelter to bats is great for local conservation efforts, and they’ll help take care of pesky mosquitoes – bloodsuckers that, unlike Dracula, you won’t want to see in your yard.
To install a bat house, choose a high spot at least twelve feet high and twenty feet away from obstacles like buildings or trees. Mounting your bat house on a pole or the side of a building is best, as setting it up in a tree can attract predators like owls and keep the house from getting the warmth it needs during the day.
An area with 6-8 hours of sunlight will help your bats stay warm and protect their young during the day. Try mounting two back-to-back, with one facing north and one facing south, to minimize temperature fluctuations.
Landscaping that’s right for you
Goth gardens are just one of the many ways you can make your yard feel like you. Whether you’re looking for full Victorian glamour or a naturalistic feel, our landscaping pros are available at just a call or click to help you on your way to the goth garden of your dreams – or your nightmares!
Main photo credit: LeeYiuTung | Shutterstock
