-
Why I Hate Landscape Fabric: An Unfair and Unbalanced Look at Weed Cloth
The other day I wrote up a post about how to use landscape fabric without screwing it up. Previously I’d written about when using landscape fabric is a good idea and when it’s not. Sometimes I try to be fair and balanced on an issue so I don’t sound like some kind of gardening zealot. Today…
-
Monday Miscellany: Wildlife Gardening
Fall is a great time of year to be thinking about the wildlife. If you can hold off deadheading, leave some fall leaves on the ground for overwintering insects, and make any fall-planting choices good for wildlife, you will have really amped things up for your local butterflies, birds, and other creatures. Here’s some reading…
-
Professional Tips for Using Landscape Fabric Right
I’m no fan of landscape fabric, but I accept that it can be a useful tool in the garden in a few select circumstances. I go into how to decide whether landscape fabric is a good choice for you in this article, but if you’ve decided to use it, I wanted to provide you with…
-
Duh-sign Award Winner: Seriously, ASLA?
The American Society of Landscape Architects announced this 2010 Honor Award winner recently, and I was really shocked to see it. It’s a concrete and granite playscape perfectly designed for maximum head injury. Anyone who’s ever been around kids knows that expecting them to play carefully and with grace is like expecting a kangaroo to…
-
Monday Miscellany: End-of-Summer Pruning, Nursery Sales, Barberries, and How to Snag the Right Shot
Can’t believe summer’s officially over! Everyone in Humboldt’s complaining that we didn’t even HAVE a stupid summer this year, while everyone else is complaining about the record heat. Grass is always greener, I guess. Anyway, here’s what’s going on in the gardening world right now… End-of-summer pruning Towards the end of summer, a lot of…
-
When Your Garden Isn’t Going Right…
The most common reason I’m called in as a garden coach is that the person I’m meeting with needs an outside perspective. It’s really, really hard to evaluate our homes and gardens from a logical, clear place in our minds and hearts. Sometimes, we’ve had arguments with our spouse or kids about what we’ll do…
-
Renovation and Restoration in the Landscape
It can be hard to know where to begin in giving your garden a fresh start. Overgrown shrubs, faded patio furniture, and areas that lack any kind of visual power (beyond the “yuck” factor!) can make it hard to know where to focus our energies, especially if we know we can’t tackle everything at once.…
-
Low-Maintenance Landscaping: How to Tim Ferriss Your Garden Routine
Do you have more garden than time? Even people who love, LOVE to garden sometimes find their landscape a source of guilt rather than joy. So many times when I’m visiting a garden, I’m making enthusiastic exclamations over the abundance and beauty of it all, the owner of the garden is saying things like, “well,…
-
Plants to Love: Rainbow Drooping Leucothoe (Leucothoe fontanesiana ‘Rainbow’)
I know you’re wondering, so let’s get this out of the way: it’s loo-kow-thow-ee. You only have to say the name once though, when you’re looking for it at the nursery, and then you can call it anything you like. “That gorgeous variegated thing” is what most people call it. Andrew of Garden Smackdown suggests…
-
Book Review of Japanese Maples by Vertrees and Gregory
Book Review of Japanese Maples: The Complete Guide to Selection and Cultivation, by J.D. Vertrees and Peter Gregory, Fourth Edition, Timber Press As a landscape designer, a critical part of my work is in recognizing the subtle differences between plants and what they do, so that I can play off the most unique attributes and…
-
Monday Miscellany: Tuesday Edition
Yeah, so I’m a day late to hit Monday Miscellany on an actual Monday. But you wouldn’t have had me miss out on the Labor Day sunshine, would you? Anyway, let’s jump right in to some of the cool stuff happening around the web in the last week. The North Coast Almanack Amy Stewart, best…