Formal garden design, from a photo of your own garden.
Formal garden design brings order and elegance: clean symmetry, clipped evergreen structure and restrained, beautiful planting. Upload a photo of your garden, choose the formal look, and see it redesigned into something timeless – with a real planting plan to build it.
First design free · no card needed · UK plants
What makes a formal garden
Formal garden design is built on order: symmetry, straight lines or precise geometry, and clipped evergreen structure that gives the garden a crisp architecture all year. Think matching pairs either side of a path, low box hedges framing the borders, and a restrained, elegant palette rather than a riot of colour. It is timeless, calm and endlessly smart.
Garden Design App reads a photo of your real garden and redesigns it into this ordered style, keeping your paths, walls and existing structure where they are. It brings the clipped bones and balanced planting of a formal garden to your actual space.
The plants that make the look.
The planting plan lists them in full, with how many to buy and where each goes – so the garden in the picture is one you can actually plant.
Clipped box (or alternatives)
low hedges and balls – the backbone of formal structure
Yew
dark, dense evergreen for hedges and topiary
Standard bay or holly
matching pairs for symmetry either side of a path or door
Lavender
a scented, formal edge along a path or parterre
Roses
elegant repeat-flowering roses within a clipped framework
Hornbeam
for crisp, formal hedging and pleached screens
Alliums
geometric flower heads that suit a formal scheme
Salvias
upright spires repeated for rhythm and order
Catmint
a soft edge that flatters clipped structure
Topiary shapes
cones and spheres for focal points and repetition
White or pastel planting
restrained colour that keeps the look elegant
Standard wisteria or hydrangea
a refined focal specimen
Structure first, then elegant planting
The heart of a formal garden is its evergreen framework – clipped hedges, topiary shapes and matching specimens that hold the design through every season. Within that framework, the flowering planting is deliberately restrained: repeated, rhythmic and often in a limited palette, so it reads as considered rather than busy. The planting plan names the full list, with how many to buy and where each goes.
From idea to a plan you can plant
When you find a design you love, unlock its professional planting plan: every plant named, how many of each, exactly where it goes, and a month-by-month flowering calendar – with the evergreen structure that keeps a formal garden handsome in winter as well as summer.
Professional garden designers often charge over £1,000 for this. Your first design is free, so you can see your own garden reimagined before you spend anything.
Good to know.
Everything people ask about formal garden design.
How does the AI garden design work?
Upload a photo of your garden or a single border, and tell us what you'd like: refresh your borders, keeping your garden's shape, or redesign the whole space with new layout, paths and planting. Pick a style, and we generate a photorealistic redesign of your actual garden. When you love one, unlock its planting plan – every plant, how many to buy, and where each goes.
Are the plants real – can I actually buy and plant them?
Yes. Every design can become a planting plan of real, available UK plants, with quantities, each plant's mature height and spread, where it goes and a month-by-month flowering guide. The plans are built on real horticultural data and shaped by a professional gardener – not generic AI guesses – so the garden in the picture is a garden you can genuinely plant.
Do I need a special photo or camera?
No – a normal phone photo is perfect. Photograph your whole garden if it's small and simple, or one border at a time for larger or more complex gardens, where each bed has its own light and soil.
Is the first design really free, and what does it cost after?
Your first design is genuinely free, with no card required. After that, subscriptions start at £19 a month. The professional planting plan is a separate one-off you only buy if you want to make a design real.
Other garden styles.
Your formal garden is one photo away.
See it redesigned in about two minutes. The first one's on us.