For most of the last decade, the aspirational garden was a loud one: color-blocked flower beds, precisely trimmed hedges, the kind of landscaping designed to photograph well from a doorway. Lately, a quieter look has been taking over.

Landscape designers describe rising interest in what several have started calling “quiet gardens” — loose, muted plantings heavy on grasses and self-seeding perennials, arranged to look faintly accidental even when they are not.

“Clients used to bring me photos of gardens that looked finished,” said a fictional landscape designer who has seen a shift in client requests over the past two years. “Now they bring me photos of gardens that look like nobody’s touched them in a while. That’s much harder to design, if you want to know the truth.”

Part of the appeal, designers say, is maintenance: a quiet garden tolerates a missed week of weeding better than a manicured one does. Part of it is simply fatigue with gardens designed primarily to be photographed rather than sat in.

“You can’t really appreciate a quiet garden from a photo,” said one homeowner who redid her front bed last spring. “You have to be standing in it, ideally doing nothing in particular.”

Not everyone is convinced the trend will last. “Every generation rediscovers the unclipped hedge and calls it a revolution,” one longtime nursery owner said, with visible amusement. “Ask me again in five years.”