One thing I see less and less in gardens these days are gardeners that mix annual plants with perennials and shrubs. I’m not sure why, but it seems to be that fewer and fewer gardeners take the time to design border combinations using all kinds of herbaceous materials: annuals, perennials, and tender perennials like dahlias. [...]
Earlier this year in March, well before the hustle and bustle of the spring planting season, a fellow designer and I attended the Philadelphia Flower Show. If you have never been to the Philly Flower Show you don’t know what you are missing. Make a point of attending next year. There is no better [...]
Late winter in New England is never an easy time. The weather turns quickly, changing from frigid, to raw (a term I never used for the weather until I came to Connecticut), to warm, and then back again to cold or raw. Wet and heavy snow, like the kind we had a few weeks ago, [...]
There is an increasingly vocal group of garden writers making their name by proclaiming the ease of low or no maintenance landscapes, and while a no maintenance garden sounds good, it just isn’t realistic. The truth is that the real work begins after the plants are in and the landscaping crew has loaded up and [...]
After 15 years as a professional garden designer I feel confident that I know what it takes to grow healthy plants in the landscape. The variables of sun exposure, soil condition, availabilty of water, and seasonal climate are all factored into my plant selections because what each plant needs to grow and thrive is just [...]
This is the time of year, as the catalogs arrive in the mail and seed displays pop up in the garden centers, when experienced gardeners start to think about seeds. This is also the time of year when we will be subjected to at least one heart-felt missive from a magazine editor, TV show host, [...]
Savvy gardeners know that fall is for planting. The milder weather is less stressful on newly installed plants, decreasing the need to water them every day to keep their roots alive and to ensure the rest of the plant will thrive. The fact that plants are beginning to enter their seasonal dormancy also helps them [...]
Planting bulbs in the fall for spring flowers is a long standing tradition with many gardeners, but it is a tradition that has slowly declined in popularity. Many new homeowners–and therefore new garden owners–long for the spring show of tulips or jonquils (daffodils) that they remember from their mothers’ or grandmothers’ gardens, but most don’t [...]
Gardening, like most every other pastime, is an on going learning experience. Much of what good gardeners learn comes from what we read in books or magazines, which we then put to the test in our gardens. Yet, some of the best lessons are passed along to us from other gardeners. Simple lessons such as [...]
I’ve been working in the landscaping field for over fifteen years and in that time I have received a lot of useful advice from experienced plantsmen. As I worked my way up the ranks from a waterer and weeder, installation laborer, to a landscape designer, the most memorable advice I ever heard was when Brent, of Brent [...]