Top 10 Gardening Trends for 2025 from the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society


The following list of top 10 trends provides gardeners of all experience levels with inspiration, education, and exploration in the garden.

1. Tropical Foliage

While many may think drama in the garden comes from bountiful blooms, impactful foliage can be just as stunning. Incorporating plants with great foliage is a simple way to create long-lasting ornament in a home garden, stoop garden, containers, or window boxes. With the introduction of new annual and tropical foliage plants, there are more options than ever to create a great accent in the summer garden, adding unique color and seasonal flair.

Plant Options:
  • Colocasia, elephant ears – Pharaohs Mask, Redemption, Royal Hawaiian ‘Waikiki’
  • Coleus – Talavera ‘Sienna,’ ChargedUp ‘Campfire’
  • Caladium
  • Begonias

2. Influencing the Garden

Garden influencers are taking social media by storm, sharing exciting, educational content on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and YouTube. Influencers such as Summer Rayne Oakes (@HomesteadBrooklyn) inspire gardeners with creative, snack-sized tips while organizations like PHS offer expert advice (@PHSGardening) through gardening “How-Tos,” demonstrations, plant recommendations, and more to help gardeners cultivate their green thumb.

3. Bringing Nature Home

Inspired by Doug Tallamy’s influential book of the same name, this trend emphasizes climate-friendly, ecologically diverse, home gardening that anyone can implement. With climate change and its effects becoming increasingly prominent, gardeners around the world are turning to approaches that preserve, protect, and restore local ecosystems by incorporating native and pollinator plant species and adopting climate-friendly maintenance strategies. While many gardeners see winter as one of the dreariest times of year in the garden, this trend champions the importance of year-round gardening, and positions winter as the ideal time for education and planning to ensure you’re set up for success come spring.

Below are just a few trending ways that gardening can promote environmental stewardship:

Predictions for 2025: We Asked, You Answered

  • Movements like “Leave the Leaves” have promoted using leaves as a natural mulch, which also provides a habitat for overwintering insects.
  • Planting native plants like milkweeds, Asclepias; mountain mints, Pycnanthemum, and a host of native asters is a great way to attract native moths, butterflies, wasps, and other beneficial insects to your garden.
  • Protecting bees via “bee hotels,” pans of water, the reduction of lawns, and creating other intentional habitats, helps provide homes to more than 300 species of native bees.

4. Gardens under Glass

Creating gardens under glass is making a comeback among houseplant enthusiasts. Ranging from simple terrariums to large-scale greenhouses, the interest in gardening using a glass environment has boomed. For those with minimal space or light, terrarium gardens offer a technique to display plants with a particularly unique, personalized, and aesthetic flair. Additionally, because of the enclosed nature of terrariums, they become a micro-ecosystem, allowing you to grow fascinating carnivorous plants and humidity-loving varieties on something as small as a windowsill.

Plant Options:
  • Begonias
  • Gesneriads
  • Ferns
  • Selaginella, spikemoss
  • Fittonia, nerveplant
  • Peperomia
  • Pilea

5. On the Wall

Living “green” walls and vertical gardens are popping up as both outdoor and indoor installations. Green walls are especially popular in office buildings and other public spaces, and many incorporate amazing displays of tropical plants. This trend is a great option for gardeners looking to up the aesthetic impact of an indoor space and add a touch of artistic greenery to a room.

Plant Options:
  • Outdoor green walls: sedum, Heuchera, hens and chicks, sedges, Liriope
  • Indoor green walls: Bromeliads, tropical ferns, pothos, kalanchoe, Philodendron, and Monstera

6. Urban Gardening

Gardening is no longer thought of as a suburban or rural activity. Urban gardening is flourishing as city dwellers transform small spaces — courtyards, stoops, window boxes, and containers — into vibrant gardens. Community gardens — where people join a shared public gardening space, are also booming, offering access to fresh food, cultural preservation, and shared joy. Meanwhile, efforts to plant fruit trees and expand street tree canopies through community-led stewardship are bringing greenery, resilience, and health benefits to urban neighborhoods across the U.S.

7. Horticulture as Therapy

Gardening is gaining recognition as a powerful tool for wellness, with research showing its benefits for mental health and overall well-being. As awareness of mental health grows, hospitals and healthcare systems are increasingly using horticulture for healing. For professionals and amateurs alike, the connection between plants and mental health is inspiring more people to cultivate greenery for both ecological and personal enrichment.

8. Water-Wise Gardening

As droughts and climate change impact more regions, water-wise gardening is gaining traction worldwide, even in parts of the world that are not known for being extremely arid. For home gardeners feeling frustrated with the constant maintenance of watering and keeping their gardens thriving in increasingly dry climates, water-wise gardening offers a solution. From designing full gravel and crevice gardens to simply incorporating drought-tolerant plants, this sustainable approach reduces maintenance and helps create resilient gardens, even with increasing periods of drought.

Plant Options:
  • Cacti
  • Succulents
  • Ornamental grasses

9. The Houseplant Phenomenon

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, houseplants have become a global obsession, making gardening accessible for anyone, regardless of space. From homes to offices, houseplants bring beauty and wellness indoors. Dedicated societies like the Gesneriad, Begonia, and Aroid Societies reflect the enduring appeal of this green trend and offer houseplant enthusiasts outlets to engage with other plant lovers to share knowledge.

Plant Options:
  • Aroids, such as Anthurium, Philodendron, Monstera
  • Sansevieria snake plant
  • Ficus shivereana
  • Hoya

10. Backyard Fruit

Growing fruit is gaining popularity alongside vegetable gardening, appealing to both professionals and hobbyists. Many gardeners are incorporating fruit trees to combine delicious harvests with garden beauty.

Plant Options:
  • Diospyros kaki, Asian persimmon
  • Diospyros virginiana, American persimmon
  • Asimina triloba, ‘paw paw’
  • Amelanchier canadensis, serviceberry
  • Pomegranates, which were once thought to be a subtropical or Mediterranean tree, are now hardy and fruit-producing in USDA Zone 7.
  • Fruit Snacks is a new line of apple tree cultivars from Plants Nouveau which have been selected for their upright and diminutive stature.
  • Bushel and Berry is a series of compact berry plants including blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, and strawberries.

“These 2025 gardening trends aggregate a mix of ideas and approaches stemming from our observations attending professional conferences, exhibitions, visiting countless personal and public gardens, and conversations with horticultural professionals. They are a fantastic reflection of what gardeners are focusing on right now, and the direction the industry at large is headed. From professionals to the beginner gardener, these trends offer inspiration and education that everyone can take something away from.” says Andrew Bunting, Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s Vice President of Horticulture.





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