garden design

Posted by the gardener in Featured Articles, containers

Five Container Tips and Five Container Recipes

Five Tips For Happy Containers Use sphagnum moss to retain moisture. Planting in sun? Don’t use dark colored containers which soak up more heat. Use the largest containers to give your plants the best root growing environment. Larger containers look more impressive, too. How you water is an extremely important part of container gardening. Use a good potting soil, water often. Choose plant companions...

Posted by the gardener in Featured Articles, garden design, veggies

Your Own French Potager

There are Kitchen gardens, and then there is the French potager. Like saying, there is cuisine, and then there is French cuisine. You may interpret the distinction in your own mind, but I think there is a subcategory that the French potager holds as all its own in the concept of kitchen gardens. Just as we have come to appreciate the special inflection of the Cottage garden in feeling and style, the French...

Posted by the gardener in Featured Articles, garden theme, insects, plant lists

Encouraging the Honeybees: Making a Bee Garden

The honeybee populations of the USA have been drastically diminishing [Learn about Colony Collapse Disorder], and though no one knows exactly why, one factor is less foraging. We gardeners can do something about that! It is really important that you never use pesticides in your bee garden. They poison bees. Starvation is currently considered to be the leading cause of bee mortality.[1] So What Do Bees Like? early...

Posted by the gardener in Featured Articles, Seasonal, garden design, trees

Winter Outlines Garden Bones

Winter is a stark time for most of us in a temperate climate. Doubly so when a fresh snowfall creates lines and shapes, filled in with snowy white. We then see our garden in silhouette, and all its features are outlined for us to better judge the proportions and dimensions of our larger plantings and hardscaping. This is when we can decide how to improve the garden’s structure to give shape to the billowing...

Posted by the gardener in garden theme

The White Garden

Making an all white garden used to be quite a popular undertaking. Although the idea probably started, in modern gardening times anyway, with Gertrude Jekyll in her book, Colour Schemes for the Flower Garden, it was Vita Sackville-West who created the most famous white garden at Sissinghurst Castle. This garden was “designed to be at its best in early July and especially in the evenings or when illuminated...