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How to Make Your Region’s Plants Pop
I hear it again and again: folks think that natives are boring, that they have a short bloom season, that their foliage is dull; in short, that you’d have to be some kind of environmentalist zealot to want to garden with native plants. We’ll set aside the arguments for supporting biodiversity and feeding local birds…
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Do Landscapers Listen to Our Own Advice? Plants We’d Never Plant at Home (Part Two)
In part one, I discussed some of the beautiful and useful plants that landscapers recommend or maintain for clients, that we wouldn’t plant in our own home gardens. Whether hard to maintain, prickly, or just overused – these are perfectly good plants in many ways – but often have one fatal flaw us pro-gardeners just…
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Do Landscapers Listen to Our Own Advice? Plants We’d Never Plant at Home (Part One)
I was gardening recently with one of my employees, and she groaned in the middle of pruning a Mexican Feather Grass and said firmly, “I will NEVER plant these things at my house. Never!” It’s not a bad plant – in fact, it’s fantastic – it has seasonal interest, adds a sense of motion and …
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Time in a Garden and Seasonal Changes
Gardening Gone Wild is holding their monthly Garden Blogger’s Design Workshop, and this month’s topic, Time in a Garden, gave me a great excuse to go through some of my pictures and see how things evolve and change over the seasons and years. What did I discover? Well, for one, I don’t usually take photos…
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Is Landscape Fabric/ Weed Barrier Right for You?
One of the biggest barriers to organic gardening success, and I mean that literally, is landscape fabric. Any kind of fabric or plastic that keeps weeds down will also keep fallen leaves or mulch from adding organic matter to your soil, leaving behind a hardened, dead zone where plants struggle to survive. Now, that’s not…
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February Garden Maintenance for the Pacific Northwest
February feels like the eye of the storm for us gardeners – there’s just enough time between the winter pruning rush and the flurry of spring to take a deep breath, and begin thinking back on what worked especially well last year and what projects we might like to tackle this year. Most of my…
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The Enabled Garden; Gardening For Those With a Disability
I read an inspiring post by Fern over at Life On The Balcony this week with some tips for how to enjoy container gardening with physical limitations. She covers some great ways of training your plants to suit your needs, reducing watering, and choosing tools to make gardening easier. Fern makes an excellent point; containers…
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Cheerful Grasses Add Color and Movement to Your Winter Garden
If you’ve read a gardening magazine in the last ten years, you know how hot ornamental grasses are. We rely on them for a bold foliage accent, but so many go dormant in winter, just when we most want their striking foliage display. The solution? Check out these five favorite grasses that DON’T go dormant…
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Full Sun, Part Shade; Some Basic Insights On Light
Have you ever read a plant tag and wondered just how much sun “part sun” is? Or tried to figure out if a plant wanting “full sun” would make it in the spot that you have? Plant tags and gardening gurus spit out these terms and assume that we’ll get it right – but in…
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How Far Apart Do I Plant? Planting for the Future
If you live in the Pacific Northwest, you’ve probably had the experience more than once of buying a plant that the nursery tag said would grow to the perfect size for your garden – but within a few years, it was pushing against its neighbors and becoming unruly. Why aren’t the plant tags accurate? Well,…
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‘Tis The Season To – Wait, What? Plant?
I know it may seem counter-intuitive to get moving in the garden just as the weather starts becoming dreary, but for the northwest, this is an ideal time to get new shrubs and trees established in the garden. You can skip the watering for the most part, and no need to worry about transplant shock…