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Grassy Favorites, New and Old
While I won’t go so far as to recommend you take gardening advice from your cat, ornamental grasses comprise such a broadly useful array of plants for the landscape that it’s almost impossible to avoid falling in love with at least a few of them. Some are wispy and rustle in the wind, some are…
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A Public Service Announcement From Your Cats
Please plant more grasses. They are excellent to gnaw on:
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Humboldt’s Gothic Princess: Giant Purple Wakerobin
Who says native plants aren’t lovely? Giant purple wakerobin, or Trillium kurabayashii, is just one of the uncommon beauties found in our local forests. I love the mottled leaves, which rival those of Brunnera ‘Jack Frost’ for interest in the shade garden, but the blackish-burgundy blooms seal the deal for me and make this a…
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Book Review of Lawn Gone: Attractive Alternatives to Lawn
While I love having a minimalist patch of organic lawn in my backyard for the cats and chickens to run around on, as a landscape designer I am thoroughly “over” using lawn as the default option. It takes more maintenance, fertilizer, and water than just about anything else in the landscape, yet it gives nothing…
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2013 Garden Trends Prediction
While most trend reports depict their trends as being the next new thing, really most trends come from ideas that have been around for a while, and have just been gathering steam. There’s very little that’s new in the world, especially in something as connected to natural rhythms as gardening, but everyone brings their own…
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Best and Worst of 2012: Trends, Colors, Books, Tools, and the Most Popular Articles
2012 was a great year for gardening in many ways – the sustainability movement made for some beautiful, fresh ideas (like the insect habitat art introduced by Flora Grubb) and the continuation of the less-lawn movement gave designers an excuse to go bold with the front yard, skipping the usual lawn-with-foundation-plantings in favor of water…
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Why Grow That When You Can Grow This?: The Book
“Let’s face it: the garden is a popularity contest. High school is a metaphor for life, and gardening is no exception. Step into our gardens and we find the prom queen and the star quarterback, the cheerleader and the rebel who cut class. Popular plants rule today’s landscapes the same way popular kids rule the…
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Why Grow That When You Can Grow This? Alternatives to Overused Plants
One of the neatest things about being a plant geek is that it’s possible to find inspiration anywhere you go. In theory, at least. In reality, there’s a short list of plants in each region that are used over and over again until they become boring and dull, and these plants populate our landscapes in…
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Cool Fall Reads: New Books, Old Faves, And Some Great Deals
The chilly air, fall wind, and damp everything have harshed my gardening mellow over the last few weeks. Luckily, the downturn in weather has coincided with a rush of new books and some great deals on old favorites, so I can enjoy a connection with the outdoors without actually having to, you know, go outside.…
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The Bottomless Planter Box from Outerior Decor
I’ve been lucky enough over the previous months to get an inside peek into the making of Amy Stewart’s cocktail garden to celebrate her new Drunken Botanist book, and have gotten to look at a number of clever products and construction techniques along the way. One of those clever products is the Outerior Décor series…
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Late-Breaking Halloween News: Defeating Zombies with Garlic and Soap (Not Garlic Soap)
The zombie scourge has been ignored by the media for far too long. Why, I can’t say. The zombie apocalypse has all the makings of a perfect news story – guts, gore, and slavering undead. What more do readers want? So I’m delighted to hear that the trend-sniffing reporters over at HGTV are spreading the…