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Plants to Love: Gaultheria mucronata or Prickly Heath
Like the barely-fragrant Stinking Hellebore, Gaultheria (formerly Pernettya) mucronata has been given a somewhat undeserved and unfortunate common name, probably by some delicate-skinned maiden who’d never heard of gardening gloves.
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Using Color Echoes to Work Edibles Into Your Landscape
Ivette Soler’s new book, The Edible Front Yard, tackles the question of how to incorporate edibles and veggies into your landscape without having the whole thing look messy, or rigidly planned like a farm. How do you do that? She explains: The successful edible front garden all comes down to the right plant in the…
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Ferns for Every Garden
As we settle more deeply into winter, I’ve been really noticing the beauty of all the ferns in the landscapes I care for. They’re low-care, often have great winter interest, and seem to go with just about every type of plant or style of planting. The neat thing about ferns is they look great both…
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Plants to Love: Spanish Shawl (Heterocentron elegans)
This sweet little groundcover looks simple and refined when not in bloom, like a larger-leaved, deeper-green version of Baby’s Tears. But once it comes into bloom, it is a serious showstopper, with red hairy bracts holding disproportionately large fuchsia blooms. It flowers during the entire growing season, spring to fall, and the cheery red bracts…
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Designing a Landscape for Color Blind People
People who are color blind make up about 8% of men and .5% of women, and of those people, the vast majority aren’t actually color blind, it’s more that they see colors differently. Though we think of color blindness as seeing the world in black and white, the most common form of color blindness is…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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.…
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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…
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The Ten Best Native Plants for Coastal Northern California Wildlife by Peter Haggard
On the heels of our recent Garden Designers Roundtable on Inviting Nature Into the Garden, I wanted to share a resource that I’ve been finding incredibly helpful in recent months. While we all know that planting natives is a good way to attract more life into our gardens, if we only have space for a…