Editor’s note:
This post began life years ago as a garden style quiz—an experiment in helping people think differently about design. I no longer believe quizzes are the right tool for that work. What follows is a reframing of the original idea, minus the quiz and with a clearer point of view.
There’s a persistent idea floating around the internet that your garden has a “style,” and that with enough multiple-choice questions, someone—or something—can identify it for you.
This post used to include a quiz that promised just that. It was fun. It was shareable. It did what quizzes do. And it also quietly missed the point.
Let me explain.
When Cultivating Garden Style was published, I was looking for ways to help people engage with design thinking without making it feel intimidating or academic. At the time, quizzes were everywhere. BuzzFeed was ascendant. A quiz felt like a friendly doorway.
“Cultivating Garden Style” – The original Garden Style guide for garden makers.
by Rochelle Greayer
What the quiz was never meant to do was assign anyone a fixed identity or hand over a ready-made formula. The goal was the opposite. It was meant to crack open curiosity—to show that style isn’t something you discover, but something you build.
Somewhere along the way, that nuance got lost.
Style is not a result. It’s a synthesis.
Here’s the hard truth: no quiz can tell you how to design a meaningful landscape.
Design doesn’t work that way. It can’t. A handful of questions can’t account for:
- your climate
- your soil
- your budget
- your time
- your culture
- your history
- your tolerance for chaos
- or the fact that all of those things change
What can be taught—what actually helps—is understanding how design works in the first place.
That means learning:
- why certain ideas emerged when and where they did
- how constraints shape creativity
- which principles hold up across time
- and how to translate inspiration rather than copy it
Garden styles are responses, not templates
Design movements don’t appear out of thin air. They respond to place.
Dutch gardens look the way they do not because someone declared a “style,” but because of flat land, water management, plant supply chains, and a very specific relationship to agriculture and commerce.
Japanese gardens respond to geology, climate, belief systems, and cultural attitudes toward nature.
Islamic gardens reflect desert environments, water scarcity, geometry, and deeply held ideas about order and paradise.
These traditions are rich sources of knowledge—but they are not costumes to be worn unchanged in modern American suburbs.
Understanding them matters. Mimicking them wholesale usually doesn’t.
The real work is translation
The most interesting gardens are not style-perfect. They’re coherent.
They make sense in their place. They reflect the lives of the people who use them. They borrow intelligently, adapt generously, and evolve over time.
That’s not something you arrive at by matching answers to a key. It comes from:
- paying attention
- learning history
- understanding ecology
- making decisions
- and revisiting those decisions as conditions change
Style, when it’s working, is the byproduct of all that thinking—not the starting point.
So what was the quiz for?
At its best, the quiz was a prompt. A way to notice patterns in what you’re drawn to. A reminder that taste isn’t random, and that design choices connect across many parts of life—food, travel, art, music, materials.
If it did that for you, it did its job.
But the real work starts after the quiz ends.
It starts when you stop asking “What style am I?” and begin asking:
- What am I working with?
- What matters here?
- What can this place support?
- What do I want to learn by making it?
That’s where design actually lives.
Read more about designing with intention:
Where’s the quiz?
Hi Jana – It is linked at the bottom and also is started with the big orange button right at the bottom of the first image on this post.