How Does My Garden Grow

A Garden Planner & Journal to Organize, Track, and Design Your Dream Garden

Grow Your Connection to Nature

A planner and journal to design, track, and organize your dream garden. With structured pages for layouts, seasonal notes, and reflections, it’s a companion for gardeners who love both planning and dreaming.

This book is yet to be published. Shown is the title page.

This is an image of the title page of my book, How Does My Garden Grow.
blue-green dotted divider line

Links from

How Does My Garden Grow by Faith Shaffer

decorative wildflower line

Sidebars
Types of Gardens: Bonsai ~ Chaos ~ Container ~ Flower ~ Food Forest ~ Heirloom ~ Herb ~ Moon ~ Native Plant ~ Pollinator & Wildlife ~ Square-Foot ~ Vegetable ~ Vertical ~ Water ~ Xeriscape
Useful Websites

As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases (at no cost to you). #CommissionsEarned

blue-green dotted divider line

Sidebars

blue-green dotted divider line

Appendix 3: Types of Gardens

blue-green dotted divider line

Gardens come in many forms—far beyond the classic vegetable patch. My hope is that this list and the topic-specific websites will introduce you to new gardening styles that stir your imagination. After all, it’s never too late to plant something new!

Bonsai

A bonsai garden is a serene space dedicated to the artful cultivation of miniature trees, shaped to evoke the grandeur of nature in small scale. This ancient horticultural practice originated over a thousand years ago in China and was refined in Japan, blending aesthetics, patience, and philosophy. I recently took a class on bonsai, and am in love with it.

  • Adam’s Art and Bonsai Blog – A lively, hands-on blog by bonsai artist Adam Lavigne, featuring tutorials, tree styling demos, and workshop recaps for enthusiasts who enjoy learning through real-world examples.
  • Bonsai Mirai Academy – A comprehensive online learning platform with species-specific calendars, step-by-step video instruction, and a personalized bonsai app. Ideal for beginners or advanced practitioners.
  • National Bonsai & Penjing Museum – Hosted by the U.S. National Arboretum, this site showcases masterpiece bonsai and penjing trees and offers educational content through the National Bonsai Foundation. Make sure to read about the iconic 400-yr old Yamaki Pine
  • Valavanis Bonsai Blog– A companion to the Arboretum site, this blog dives into bonsai techniques, seasonal care, and behind-the-scenes insights from a lifelong bonsai educator.
  • Reddit Bonsai Walk-Through Forum – This community-curated guide offers a step-by-step walkthrough for beginners learning the art and care of bonsai, hosted on Reddit’s r/Bonsai wiki.
  • Bonsai Empire’s for Beginners – Provides a comprehensive introduction to bonsai cultivation, styling, and care, with clear guidance on choosing species, pruning, wiring, and maintaining healthy trees.

Chaos

A chaos garden is a free-spirited planting style where seeds—often a mix of vegetables, herbs, and flowers—are scattered randomly across a space, allowing nature to decide what grows where. This low-maintenance, surprise-filled approach encourages biodiversity, resilience, and a touch of wild beauty.

Container

Container gardening is the practice of growing plants in pots, tubs, or other portable vessels instead of directly in the ground. It’s ideal for small spaces, offering flexibility, mobility, and control over soil, water, and sunlight conditions.

Flower

Flower gardening involves cultivating blooms for beauty, fragrance, and pollinator support, whether in garden beds or containers.

Food Forest

An edible food forest is a self-sustaining garden designed to mimic a natural forest ecosystem, where every layer is planted with edible or useful plants. It’s a permaculture approach that blends biodiversity, resilience, and productivity.

Heirloom

Heirloom gardening focuses on growing plant varieties that have been passed down through generations, often prized for their flavor, resilience, and historical significance. These open-pollinated plants help preserve genetic diversity and cultural heritage in the garden.

Herb

An herb garden is a dedicated space—indoors or outdoors—where culinary or medicinal herbs are grown. It can be as simple as a few pots on a windowsill or as elaborate as a landscaped garden bed.

  • Melissa K. Norris: How to Plan a Medicinal Herb Garden – Melissa K. Norris offers a detailed, seasonal approach to planning a medicinal herb garden that supports your family’s wellness year-round, with tips on plant selection, layout, and herbal uses.
  • Gardenary: How to Grow Herbs in a Small Space – Nicole Burke shares practical, container-friendly strategies for growing a lush herb garden in tight spaces, from soil prep to plant pairings and seasonal refreshes. This is a consumer site, but their blog has some good articles.
  • Herb Seed Sources – Rare Seeds (heirloom); Fedco Seeds (no GMO, organic, locally-sourced from Maine); StrictlyMedicinalSeeds.com (open-pollinated, heirloom, non-GMO, non-hybrid and seed saver friendly)

Moon

A moon garden is designed to shine under moonlight, featuring pale or silvery blooms, fragrant night-blooming plants, and reflective foliage that glows in the dark. It invites quiet evening strolls and often attracts nocturnal pollinators like moths and bats

Native Plant

A healthy planet starts with native plants. Native plants play a vital role in supporting biodiversity, enhancing air and water quality, and offering reliable food and shelter for local wildlife. (A native plants garden is basically a pollinator and wildlife garden as well.)

Permaculture

Permaculture is a design philosophy that mimics natural ecosystems to create sustainable, regenerative systems for growing food, managing resources, and living in harmony with the environment.

  • Free Permaculture – This evolving resource hub offers free permaculture education for beginners, with free courses, tutorials, design tools, and practical guides on soil health, edible weeds, biodiversity, and sustainable living

Pollinator & Wildlife

Pollinator and wildlife gardening focuses on creating habitats that support bees, butterflies, birds, beneficial insects, and other small native animals by planting primarily native species and avoiding pesticides. It helps maintain ecological balance while adding movement, color, and life to your garden space.

Square-Foot

Square-foot gardening is a method of growing food in a small, organized space using a grid system to maximize yield and minimize waste. It’s perfect for gardeners who want efficiency, simplicity, and beauty—all in one raised bed. Most often this is accomplished in raised beds.

Vegetable

This is the main type of garden most people are familiar with. There are many resources available with detailed information, including:

  • Almanac.com Vegetable Gardening for Beginners – The Old Farmer’s Almanac offers a clear, seasonal roadmap for starting a vegetable garden, with tips on site selection, soil prep, planting schedules, and easy crops for first-time growers (Not just for beginners! This entire site is a gem.)

Vertical

Vertical gardening is a space-saving method that uses upright structures like trellises, wall planters, and espaliers to grow plants vertically instead of across the ground. It’s ideal for small areas, allowing you to cultivate vegetables, flowers, or vines along fences, walls, or freestanding frames.

  • Melissa K. Norris: Vertical Garden Ideas – Melissa K. Norris shares creative vertical gardening strategies for growing food and herbs in tight spaces, using trellises, stacked planters, and wall-mounted containers to maximize yield and beauty.
  • Vertical Garden Hub – Ultimate Beginners Guide to Vertical Gardening – A comprehensive starter guide that explains vertical garden types, plant choices, and layout tips for small spaces, balconies, and urban walls.
  • Urban Gardening Space – Vertical Gardening for Beginners – This blog shares practical advice and personal experience on setting up vertical gardens with tools, plant suggestions, and space-saving design ideas for city dwellers.
  • Espalier Basics – The Wisconsin Horticulture article on espalier explains how to train trees and shrubs into elegant, space-saving forms using pruning and support structures, ideal for decorative or productive use in small gardens.

Water

Water gardens create tranquil, reflective spaces filled with aquatic plants like lilies and reeds, often featuring ponds or fountains. Their still or gently moving water attracts frogs, dragonflies, birds, and beneficial insects, turning the garden into a lively habitat.

and its opposite…

Xeriscape

Xeriscape gardens are designed to thrive with minimal water by using drought-tolerant plants, efficient irrigation, and soil-enhancing techniques. They’re ideal for arid climates and water-conscious gardeners, blending sustainability with natural beauty.

blue-green dotted divider line

Appendix 4: Useful Websites

blue-green dotted divider line

Some of My Favorites

  • Useful Wild Plants Encyclopedia – The website calls the encyclopedia(s) “a botanical gem of the century” which is quite accurate. Anyone interested in useful wild plants NEEDS these encyclopedias. Don’t be scared of the price – they are worth even more than that!
  • Native Plant Trust: Go Botany – Though this site is for New England only, it has an excellent visual, botanical glossary.
  • Native Plant Society of Texas: Native Plant Database – While not a key-based tool, this searchable database lets you filter by region, plant type, and attributes to find native species suited to your landscape.
  • ForagingTexas.com – Find detailed posts on over 200 edible and medicinal plants, including cultivated plants. Each plant is shown in multiple, big pictures, as is all the information you need for proper identification. The edible and medicinal uses are listed, as well as range maps for Texas and the United States. Many plants are found throughout the United States (and some even worldwide). The creator of the website, Dr. Mark Vorderbruggen, has a book Foraging: Explore Nature’s Bounty and Turn Your Foraged Finds Into Flavorful Feasts (Outdoor Adventure Guide) is really great, too. Chock full of tips on finding and identifying fruits, flowers, roots, shoots, nuts, foliage, and more, the website and guidebook show you how to safely and successfully find and enjoy wild edibles and medicinals. My most frequently visited site (besides Amazon LOL).
  • Almanac.com – Incredible! Like the print version of The Old Farmer’s Almanac, this site is chock full of helpful information on: gardening, weather, moon & sun, calendar, and food.
  • Native Prairie Association of Texas
  • Volunteer Houston

Gardening Sites

  • Garden.org – This site is the largest social media website dedicated exclusively to gardening. There are: online tools that help gardeners connect, teach, share, and trade with each other; the world’s largest database of plants; a catalog of thousands of articles that teach people how to get started gardening and improve their plant growing skills; five free courses anyone can take; etc.
  • Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center – This site hosts Native Plants of North America, the most comprehensive guide to North American native plants in existence, with a free and searchable database of information about more than 25,000 native plants, 80,000 plant images, answers to more than 10,000 plant and natural gardening questions and more. Their Wildflower magazine is a nationally recognized source of native plant information and inspiration for our members.
  • Daves Garden – One of the largest gardening sites online, with over 805,000 registered members, from novice gardeners to experienced market growers. Share information, tips, plants and seeds, along with gardening triumphs and trials in this vibrant community, or browse (or submit sitings to) the huge databases they have for plants, bugs, and birds.
  • MelissaKNorris.com – Podcasts and many thorough articles on homesteading topics, including gardening
  • MotherEarthNews.com – Offers free guides, but the best content requires a low-cost subscription. Membership includes full access to the online video learning library, a year of both print and digital magazines, plus unlimited online articles, recipes, and project ideas.

Plant Databases

  • WorldFloraOnline.org – The title says it all. Digging through this site, you will also find links to many more databases. Some of these are more exhaustive than others.
  • Flora of North America – From their website “Flora of North America (FNA) presents for the first time, in one published reference source, information on the names, taxonomic relationships, continent-wide distributions, and morphological characteristics of all plants native and naturalized found in North America north of Mexico.” All of the encyclopedias are not complete yet, but what is online is wonderful.
  • Kew Royal Botanic Gardens: Plants of the World Online
  • USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service – Has detailed information, including images, and location maps with native/non-native status for each place the plant is found.
  • North American Vascular Flora (BONAP.org) – BONAP provides in-depth information on the entire vascular flora of the continent north of Mexico, as well as for Hawaii and Puerto Rico. This site offers several databases with extreme amounts of information. A must-visit!

Apps for Plants

Share photos, track plants, and chat with other gardeners with these apps.

  • iNaturalist, also available as a website – connect with other people interested in the natural world, share pictures to help others make IDs, keep life lists of the organisms (including plants!) you see, and more!
  • PlantSnap provides quick identification of over 600,000 flowers, trees, and herbs using AI.
  • GardenTags
  • GrowIt

Misc.

Find Fellow Gardeners

blue-green dotted divider line

Invasive Plants