From the category archives:

Design

Home Outside, Creating the Landscape You Love: Book Review

April 7, 2009
Read Home Outside book review

Julie Moir Messervy opens Home Outside: Creating the Landscape You Love by remarking,
Most of us feel less confident about creating outdoor living spaces than we do about our interiors. Inside, we happily paint walls, choose finishes, and buy rugs, furniture, and fixtures, but when we step outside we’re unsure of how to begin.
Maybe that’s why [...]

8 comments Read the full article →

Designing with Native Plants: Creating Sustainable Landscapes for the Finger Lakes & Upstate New York

January 19, 2009

Just learned of a fabulous workshop on designing with native plants for the Finger Lakes and upstate New York. Here’s a brief synopsis of the offerings:

Creating Habitats for Birds on Properties Large and Small
Stephen W. Kress, National Audubon Society and Lab of Ornithology
Learn how to attract birds using the native plants they love, from [...]

10 comments Read the full article →

Write your garden’s mission statement

December 31, 2008

Many of us write goals or resolutions for the new year, but have you ever considered writing your garden’s mission statement? Helen Yoest of Gardening with Confidence encourages us to do just that.
Many of us have named our garden, but I think a mission statement goes further. It forces you to think about what you [...]

38 comments Read the full article →

Margaret Roach’s Way to Garden

August 25, 2008

I have to say that blogging has brought more surprises to my life than I ever imagined. For instance, I had long enjoyed Margaret Roach’s book, A Way to Garden, and had dreamed, no, fantasized, that I might one day visit it on the Garden Conservancy’s Open Days. Yeah, right. The other side of New [...]

12 comments Read the full article →

Native Plant Resources for Central and Upstate NY

March 4, 2008

In 1878, Sherman Stowell sold to Elizabeth Brockett 30 acres of land which he had earlier purchased from George Jennings. I now live and garden with my family on some of that land, which Jennings or Stowell, or perhaps Ms. Brockett, had cleared of trees to make pasture. The forest is growing back, but it’s [...]

13 comments Read the full article →

Fallscaping: Book Review

January 28, 2008

Inspiring Ideas and Photos Take the Autumn Garden to the Next Level
I’d read several books by Piet Oudolf and by Wolfgang Oehme, but I never really “got” the fall garden until I read Fallscaping, by Nancy Ondra and Stephanie Cohen. Somehow those two American women made gardening in the fall accessible to me in a [...]

6 comments Read the full article →

The transitory rustic garden arch: Garden Bloggers’ Design Workshop

January 24, 2008

I have long fantasized having a substantial arbor dripping with roses. Ignoring the fact that there aren’t too many repeat-blooming climbers hardy enough to take my climate, I realize with dismay that my most favored place to site an arbor turns out to be on a slope every time I leave my dream world and [...]

17 comments Read the full article →

Five views of one path: Garden Bloggers’ Design Workshop

November 27, 2007

Perhaps it is a bit extreme to say “Paths make the garden,” but ever since I was a child paths have been an emotionally significant element to my enjoyment of a garden. I didn’t realize this until we moved to the rural 15 acres where we now live, when I struggled with how to turn [...]

11 comments Read the full article →

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

July 14, 2007

Long-time readers of my blog know that I have never shied away from being honest about the poor upkeep of my garden. Sometimes I find beauty in the weeds, and sometimes they depress me, but I’ve never pretended they didn’t exist. I agree with Colleen that fear of “not doing it right,” or “not being [...]

5 comments Read the full article →

Favorite Plant Combinations: May

May 18, 2007

This looked spectacular earlier in May, but the narcissus were already done by the time Gardeners Bloom Day came around.
Those orange-cup daffodils were blooming at my neighbor’s, between her house and the brook, but too far away from the house to be noticed. I marked them and dug them up and got half for myself [...]

10 comments Read the full article →

A Garden Labyrinth

April 26, 2007

And what is retirement for, if not to make a few dreams come true? And what is a garden for, if not to satisfy the longings of your heart?
I have learned a lot from watching the garden of my best garden buddy, Bub, develop. The most satisfying garden, for the gardener and for others, [...]

5 comments Read the full article →

The Intimate Garden: Book Review

April 8, 2007

The Intimate Garden: Twenty Years and Four Seasons in Our Garden by Gordon and Mary Hayward belongs to the rare breed of landscape design book that is actually helpful:

One private residential garden–not little glimpses of a dozen gardens
The garden was developed over many years. (They figured it out as they went along)
They tell you the [...]

11 comments Read the full article →

Green Frogs

March 31, 2007

Hmm, what’s your name? If you were thinking Kermit you wouldn’t be far wrong.
Winter seems to still be with me. The nights are consistently in the low 20s and snow remnants remain on the ground. Mostly on the north sides of hills and buildings, and hiding behind large trees and objects, the white has not [...]

3 comments Read the full article →

← Previous Entries