"lavender" yards, pictures, and ideas...
Tips for Designing an English Cottage Garden
One of the most charming landscape styles is the English cottage garden. This type of design works particularly well around older, smaller homes with wood, brick, or stone facades. This isn’t your frightfully well bred and proper formal British garden....
Give Your Garden The Blues
Blue (and shades of blue) is one of the most restful colors in the garden. Imagine fields of bluebonnets or the purple haze of lavender (another shade of blue) in bloom. You can have the same calming effect in your yard through the growing seasons by planting flowers of pure blue and shades of blue....
Give Your Flowers Some Companions, Part 2
There are just too many flowers that help other plants – companion plants, we call them. Either that, or these columns are too short. In any case, I find myself compelled to write about some more helpful flowers that are wonderful companions to their friends....
The Lure of Lovely Lavender
Those fortunate enough to have walked in a field of lavender and inhaled the heady aroma emanating from the purple waves of the flowering plants will most likely never forget the experience. It could be the beginning of a passionate love affair with this wonderful herb....
“Grandmother’s Garden” Hydrangeas: Today’s Fashion Flower
Hydrangeas are enjoying a renaissance in gardens throughout parts of the US. Although some of the old-fashioned varieties are not “zone friendly,” many can be successfully grown to zone 5, and a few even to zone 3....
A Yard With A View
If you want a picture perfect yard, you need to look at it through an artistic lens. Every window and door in your home is like a frame for a portion of your yard. As you develop your landscaping strategy, think about how your yard will look from each of these vantage points. ...
Drought Resistant Plants
What with global warming and climate change and maybe full moons, it really seems as if drought is more widespread than it used to be. If you want to tread softly on the earth, you may be interested in using more drought-resistant plants in your landscaping....
Be a Cottage Garden Renegade
It is easy to be intimidated by all the gardening and landscaping information out there. Books, magazines, websites, and how-to TV shows promise to teach you all the fundamentals of good design in one fell swoop and leave you ready to give your yard a full makeover in the time it takes to turn a page, click a link, or sit through to the next commercial break....
Lawn Gone!
A sprawling, lush carpet of thick, green grass is as much a part of the American Dream as white picket fences, cul-de-sacs, and minivans with built-in DVD players. When everything is right, lawns look awesome....
