Here are some theme garden ideas to jump-start your creativity and get you started on your own theme garden adventure. Most of the plants mentioned are available at your local well-stocked nursery and garden center. You'll find plants for the more challenging themes in specialty garden catalogs or by searching the Internet. There are many plant growers that specialize in theme gardening and older varieties or heritage plants.

Remedy Garden

Try your hand at growing the family's medicine chest. You'll find an enormous selection of herbs with medicinal values. The medicinal properties of herbs are well documented, but you do need to be aware of possible interactions with your prescription medicines. Consult your physician before combining and ingesting herbs and prescriptions. Be cautious of information you find regarding herbs as medicines while surfing the Internet; unless the source of the information is scholarly or from a known authority, you may getting poor advice. Find information about processing herbs and dosages at your local library. Books by author Euell Gibbons are very reliable. If you plan to use plants to support health, we urge you to do some research first. Try published books, clinical trials and studies of the active constituents of plants. All plants are chemically complex: Their actions may be gentle or quite dramatic. As with anything you will ingest or put on your skin, be sensible, do no harm and be responsible in your approach to using plants for medicine.

Celebrity or Name Garden

Many varieties of roses, peony, day lilies, and iris are named after celebrities. Sarah Bernhardt peony is one that most gardeners are familiar with. Other flowering plants have more ordinary names such as johnny-jump-up and Sweet William. You might also like to focus on the names of royalty, as in Queen Anne's Lace - a North American Native wildflower. Maybe study up on Thomas Jefferson and his garden and duplicate some of the features in his garden in your own.

Edible Flowers Garden

Kids will love to eat flowers, but this one is really an adult project. Young children have trouble distinguishing between the edible flowers in the garden and all the other flowers. Use your common sense with edible flowers and don't eat ones that have mud on them or were sprayed with pesticides. Don't pick flowers by the roadside to eat. They have been exposed to automobile exhaust and there are too many unknowns to make them safe to eat.

Only eat the petals of flowers, not the stamens or pistils. Most importantly, do not eat any flower that youthink is safe; only eat the ones youknow for sure are okay to ingest. Among the edible flowers, the most common are garlic blossoms, chive blossoms, bachelor button, bee balm, burnet, calendula, carnation, chamomile, chrysanthemum, dandelion, day lily, geranium, honeysuckle, pansy, nasturtium, petunia, rose, snapdragon, sunflower and violets.

Native Species Garden

For those gardeners who like a treasure hunt the all-native garden is just the right garden. In this garden you will search for those plants indigenous to your region. Include your state flower. Many well-stocked nursery and garden centers will have many native plants to get you started. This type of garden often needs less tending because the plants have adapted themselves to your growing conditions.