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Feng Shui Your Garden With These Expert-Approved Tips

Author:

Sarah Regan

May 06, 2020

mbg Spirituality & Relationships Editor

By Sarah Regan

mbg Spirituality & Relationships Editor

Sarah Regan is a Spirituality & Relationships Editor, and a registered yoga instructor. She received her bachelor's in broadcasting and mass communication from SUNY Oswego, and lives in Buffalo, New York.

May 06, 2020

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When you hear "feng shui," you might think of rearranging your bedroom, your living room, or other places inside your home. But you might be forgetting your own backyard. That's right: You can—and definitely want to!—feng shui your outdoor space. (After all, at its core, feng shui is all about connecting with nature.) Here are a few ways to get started, recommended by the co-founders of Mindful Design Feng Shui School Anjie Cho and Laura Morris.

How to use feng shui in your garden:

Work with the elements.

The five elements of feng shui are wood, fire, earth, metal, and water. Incorporating all of these elements into your garden can help promote balance. Some fun ways to do so include:

Wood: If you have trees and greenery in your garden, you likely already have this element covered. Morris notes that planting evergreens, which hold their green color all year round, can help you maintain this element.
Fire: The sunlight itself gives your garden a fire element, but to give it a little more, Cho says you can add plants that have red accents or triangular-shaped leaves. Morris likes Japanese maple, purple leaf sand cherry, and red dogwood.
Earth: To incorporate more earth into your garden, bring on the rocks. They can be a big as boulders or as small as pebbles. Ceramic pots also count! And as for colors to add, earth corresponds with browns and yellows.
Metal: The color of metal is white, so this is a good reason to plant shrubbery or plants with white blooms, like bridal white spirea or potentilla flowers, according to Morris. You can also incorporate metal more literally with a wind chime, which can add a lovely sound to your garden as well.
Water: To add more water element to your garden, consider investing in a small fountain, birdbath, or even a basin of water in a beautiful bowl, Cho says. The color for water is black, Morris adds—a good thing to keep in mind if you're looking for new lawn furniture.

Consult the bagua map.

While usually used inside the home, the nine bagua map areas can definitely be applied to a garden. "You can focus on one of the bagua map areas and plant according to colors you want to work with," says Cho. For example, if you want your outdoor space to foster loving energy, you can add more deep reds, pinks, oranges, burgundies, and yellow tones to the "love and marriage" bagua area, located at the rear right-hand corner of your garden.

Keep chi flowing with curvy lines.

"In Chinese folklore, evil spirits can only walk in a straight line," Cho explains. "So in a Chinese or a feng shui garden, you have these meandering paths to add a level of protection."

Rather than having hard lines in your garden, Morris says that "flowing border edges and curvy, meandering pathways" carry a more free-flowing and positive energy.

How NOT to use feng shui in your garden:

Don't let your tree branches touch the house.

And lastly, some helpful "don'ts" (aside from avoiding straight and harsh lines or overusing one element): Cho advises keeping tree branches off your house. It's OK if plants, flowers, and other greenery are touching your house, but branches should be trimmed back.

Don't group things in even numbers.

If you're adding multiples of a certain plant to your outdoor space, Morris says to avoid grouping in numbers other than three and five. "Three and five are more dynamic and also have softer chi," she says.

"In general," Cho adds in summation, "you want to create a garden that supports your home, that you can also manage, and that's not overwhelming—because you don't want to create a difficult situation for yourself."