Wizard101: Using Gardens to Accent Your House's Outdoor Experience

James is an active Wizard101 player and Twitter user specializing in housing decoration and the collection of rare and useful items. He's sharing a few advanced tips and tricks for themed gardens in your Wizard's home.

Garden features are a great way to make your exteriors look more complete, sophisticated, and natural. After all, whenever a person arrives at a new house, they immediately appear on the outside, so it's important to try and give your visitor a good first impression!

In this guide, I'll highlight three popular garden themes and provide ideas for garden features in each. Each theme will mention key elements of the theme so that you can get ideas for more items to add to your own garden. I will also highlight important items and provide tips about them in the "Notable Items" section of each theme.

Note that this guide is not intended for beginners so I will not be explaining how to perform complex glitches to replicate the look of some of the pictures.

If you are not sure where to find some of these items, just type in their name into the search box on Wizard101Central.com/wiki. The Wiki will tell you any direct sources the item comes from, as well as if it can be sold to the Bazaar (AKA if it is auctionable).

Garden Theme #1: Graveyard Scenery

If you have a death-themed house, a graveyard scene is a must! Even though it is a yard of death, gardens fill in the emptier areas of graveyards and make them feel overgrown, forgotten, and spookier. Graveyard scenery mostly consists of dark green plant life. Faded or dark colored pots, red flowers, and dark stone items also often match well with this theme.

Notable items for this theme:

• Hedge Row: a great way to line or block off areas. If you have the room, creating a hedge row maze would also be a great spooky centerpiece for a graveyard.

• Darkmoor Skeletal Tree: I like this tree much better than the series of Dead Trees, which I think are too graphically outdated for most homes. Since the tree leans slightly, it looks great on edges of cliffs with the tree leaning slightly off the cliff.

• Imposing Darkmoor Arch: can be used as an entrance to a graveyard or hedge maze.

• Stepping Stones: Helpful for providing a path to lead your visitors through your yard. If you have room, you could also place them between hedge rows. Note: if you are making a path, turn them in opposite directions each time you connect them, because if you put them in the same exact direction they will look unnatural since each of the stones will always repeat in the same place.

• Flower Petals: this is a wonderful item to fill the emptier parts of your yard. It is also worth noting that visitors can walk on top of these.

• Von Shane Sarcophagus: a great item to put at the end or corner of a graveyard. 

• Fir Trees: the fir trees are cool items because they can be placed in very tight spaces, and you can put multiple in a small area. To create an overgrown atmosphere, it’s helpful to tightly squeeze them between other fir trees of various sizes.

This graveyard uses the stepping stones to carry your visitors through the scene.

The tiered fir trees create an overgrown and ominous feeling to the garden scene.

At the end of the graveyard, there is a centerpiece item: The Von Shane Sarcophagus. If you want your garden to act as a major part of your outside experience, it is a good idea to include some kind of centerpiece item.

Garden Theme #2: Tranquil Garden Scenery

This is another very popular one – a tranquil garden. Gardens like these focus on lots of bright flowers, light stones and water sources. It is often associated with Mooshu. Colorful items and light woods also work well with this theme. These gardens have lots and lots of detail to make them look like they're thriving, so it may not be the ideal theme if you have a very large yard or limited item space available. 

Notable items for this theme:

• Boulders/Stones: similar in concept to the fir trees in the graveyard theme, try stacking these close together. You can also try placing some plant life near the base of the rocks.

• Potted Plants: try sinking these into the pond features such as the Brick-Walled Pond.

• Bamboo Grove: this item is great for filling in empty spaces because it is enormous and detailed.

• House Stage Set: a popular design choice with this item is to turn it backwards, because it looks like a house from that angle. You can stack and connect them to create entire buildings. If you connect these sets together, make sure to offset their heights slightly, otherwise you’ll deal with visual glitch issues.

• Tanglebrush: this item is good for filling in small empty spaces, such as corners. It also looks good when you place various flowers (such as the pink lily) or dewberries near or on top of the tanglebrush.

• Hollow Log: this item is great because it can be used for many different things. Some ideas include using it as a bench, filling in emptier areas, or blocking off areas.

• Koi Pond: with a bit of clever glitching, you can place a hollow log near the top of the waterfall portion of this pond to make it seem like the log is pouring water out into the pond.

• Red Leaf Tree and Windswept Tree: these trees are enormous so it is a good idea to use them as a centerpiece item or place them up high so that they don’t take up too much space where the people will be walking.

• Stuffed Owl: with a bit of glitching, you can hide the perch that this owl has and make it seem like it’s an actual owl resting in your garden.

It's always good to have a little place to sit and relax in a garden area.

Stacking the house stage sets makes your yard look bigger than it actually is, and putting the large trees beyond them makes it appear even bigger.

This picture highlights blending together various different plants to make your garden appear like it is thriving and bursting with lots of different colors.

Garden Theme #3: Manor/Mansion Scenery

This theme contrasts symmetry and sophistication with disorder and complexity. In other words, certain elements of the theme are very uniform, while other are all over the place and haphazard. When you mix these two concepts together, you create a regal atmosphere that also feels homey and inviting. Dark woods, light and dark stones, and most any regular plant will work well with this theme. Ornate detailing on items also matches this theme.

Notable items for this theme:

• Flowers (various): these flowers (there are various names for them) are a way great way to line paths and the edges of structures, and to fill in emptier parts of gardens.

• Tree Fountain: a great centerpiece item. It also looks great on the sides of cliffs because of its slightly slanted look.

• Garden Lot: this item is a great way to section off certain parts of the garden.

• Wispy Tree: this item looks great when lined along areas or as a centerpiece item. It is very tall, however, so try to place it near areas where other tall items reside so that it doesn't look too out-of-place.

• Wooden Trough: try placing various flowers in these and perching them on window sills.

• Park Bench: a great way to make your garden appear more inviting is to provide seating. The park bench is a pretty neutral item that will match almost any item around it.

• Potted Plants: even though you have an outdoor garden theme, potted plants are a great way to make the garden appear more sophisticated and well-kept. Try placing any of these, such as the Potted Pointsetta, along pathways or on edges to fill in empty space.

The castle block structure follows a uniform pattern that make the entrance look more formidable, while the fir trees give it a homier atmosphere.

Inside the courtyard, there is a centerpiece item: The Splendid Wysterian Fountain. The garden plot is a great item to separate sections of a garden and imply that the visitors shouldn't walk into that area.

In the garden plot area, piles of flowers and bushes stack up on top of each other, filling in corners of the courtyard as well as making it seem like the garden is thriving.

I hope some of these tips were helpful and gave you some ideas on how to better decorate your exteriors!

Thanks to James for this post!