Gardening Trends of 2025
January 7th, 2025
Nature-friendly gardening seems to be graduating from mere trend to a lasting and widespread mainstream movement.
Certified Wildlife Habitats like this one at Kevin Kelly’s Lower Paxton Twp. yard are trendy heading into 2025.
That’s the prevailing development that gardening trend-watchers see as we head into 2025, with interrelated facets of that movement – including native plants, pollinator gardens, and less-perfect lawns – all growing and dominating how we view yard care.
Garden Media Group’s 2025 Gardening Trends Report dubs it “nature’s renaissance.”
Here’s a look at that movement along with other gardening trends shaping up in the coming year:
Nature at gardening’s forefront
Katie Dubow, president of Chester County-based Garden Media Group, says nature’s comeback is in part a backlash to the “clean, green, tidy, mulched and weed-free” standards that come with our higher-than-ever percentage of urban and Home Owners Association-governed landscapes.
“The good news is that there is a burgeoning movement to reintegrate natural elements into these highly regulated and often concrete-heavy environments,” Dubow says.
Those include tree plantings, community-greening efforts, and a shift toward plants and plant care that take the local eco-system into account.
“This renaissance is not merely about aesthetics,” Dubow says. It’s mainly about “creating better environments for both nature and humans, enhancing storm-water management, cooling, improving air quality, reducing noise, boosting mental health, reducing violence, and supporting urban wildlife.”
The movement also means a more diverse plant lineup in home gardens, one that Pennsylvania Horticultural Society Vice President of Horticulture Andrew Bunting says leans heavily on native and pollinator-attracting varieties.
Bunting also mentions enviro-friendly practices such as “leaving the leaves” (using fallen leaves as natural mulch to encourage overwintering insects), shrinking or replacing chemically managed lawns, and installing “bee hotels” to support local bee populations.
“Modern meadows” are slightly more planned than wild meadows but still low-care.
A move toward “almost meadows”
Hand in hand with the nature movement, says Katie Tamony, chief marketing officer and trend-spotter for Monrovia growers, is replacing lawns with what she calls “modern meadows.”
These are flower-heavy, low-input, and somewhat designed gardens of pollinator-friendly perennials, native grasses, and even edibles as opposed to a more hands-off wild meadow.
“The modern take on this natural garden style has the appeal that people seek with native plants, but it’s better behaved and easier to care for,” she says. “You’ll still have the feeling of a wild meadow… just on an easier scale.”
Alyssa Hagarman, Hershey Gardens’ horticulture manager, sees the same trend, except she calls it “meadow-inspired landscapes.”
“The plants in meadow-inspired landscapes require less maintenance, something that home gardeners find appealing, plus it has other advantages,” she says.
Among them: less water needs, no spraying, more interest to pollinators and wildlife than lawns, and flexibility to add annuals (including money-saving self-seeding ones) to max out the bloom all season.
Read George’s column on how to turn lawn space into meadow space
