Edible Gardening
Embrace a lifestyle rooted in abundant – and organic – herb, fruit and vegetable gardening. By growing much of your own food, herbs and flowers, gardeners can feed and nurture themselves and their friends. The edible garden is no longer a rural phenomenon. Inspired by culinary passions, a desire for healthy and sustainable food sources, and pure economy, more people are planting and tending to their own little vegetable patch than ever before. The ongoing edible features will inspire the chef, the winemaker, the herbalist and the backyard orchardist.
Gardens in the Sky
Not all square feet are created equal. You can grow a lush, private landscape in the sky and fill a terrace or rooftop garden with trees, shrubs and other design features typically found in larger backyard. Tour some amazing rooftop, penthouse and balcony gardens where owners are transported by their quiet, serene, and soul-sustaining environments several floors above the street. Discover the possibilities of growing your favorite plants in containers – using design elements typically found in larger gardens. Learn success tips that address particular challenges of wind, sun, fog, and other elements; lightweight planting boxes, irrigation and more.
The Sustainable Landscape
Regardless of the motivation, it’s smart to go green in your own backyard. Architects, homebuilders and developers are embracing the sustainable home movement, and the idea of a sustainable landscape is just as important. And where eco-friendly gardening once meant sacrifice, these days it’s rather a case of less is more. Going green in your landscape often means lower water bills, less mowing and more afternoon choruses from native songbirds.
Indoor Herb Gardens
Grow aromatic and savory plants for taste and beauty all year long. Fresh herbs aren’t just a summertime pleasure. You can grow them in a sunny window year ‘round – regardless of Mother Nature’s whims. Whether you start plants inside or move them indoors from the garden as temperatures drop, there are some basic tips to follow for growing healthy and delicious indoor herbs.
Garden for Wildlife
When living creatures come to your garden, it’s a sure sign that you’ve created a healthy, natural, organic landscape. Design and nurture a backyard habitat that features flowering native plants and those that provide nectar and seeds to songbirds, butterflies, hummingbirds and bees. Learn about choosing plants that feed winged creatures, pollinators and beneficial insects. You’ll enjoy an environment teeming with wildlife, teach your children about the cycle of nature, and take pleasure in the simplicity of the land.
Meditation Gardens
The quiet, contemplative life is often drawn to nature. The garden is a perfect venue for incorporating elements that enhance and encourage meditation, prayer and serenity. You can add traditional labyrinth, erect an altar for candles or incense, incorporate the calming influence of music, trickling water or chimes. Add a bench or chair from which you can observe the interior scenery or capture glimpses of distant vistas. Treat the landscape as a personal, sacred space to nourish your spirit and soul.
Chocolate Plants?
As in fashion and interior design, a full spectrum of chocolate-brown hues frosts outdoor landscapes. It shows up in pottery, furnishings and fabrics, but also in chocolate-colored and chocolate-scented plants. When we catch a whiff or a glimpse of this yummy flavor in a garden setting, it’s completely unexpected. Innovative nurseries and breeders are experimenting with the darker end of the floral spectrum. You can call this trend HOT CHOCOLATE. Plants in mouth-watering hues aren’t limited rich, saturated browns. Flower petals may be dusky or brown-streaked; foliage may be mahogany, cocoa and mocha. Together, these plants create an avant-garde planting style you’ll want to savor, a sweet treat for the senses.
Design a Sensory Garden
Yes, a landscape should be visually stimulating. But don’t forget the other senses. You can incorporate design elements that excite all of the senses. Touch: grow tactile plants with fuzzy or velvety leaves that can be stroked. Smell: plant scented shrubs near the front porch or back door so you can inhale their perfume, even when you’re racing to the curb. Taste: grow a fresh, edible garden of berries, fruit, herbs and vegetables. Snacking is encouraged! Sound: incorporate music and wind chimes to bring pleasing sounds into the garden. A sensory design enhances any garden.
A Lavender Life
There’s something intoxicating about a field of lavender. Seeing and smelling row upon row of dreamy purple drifts instantly transports you to the south of France. Heady whiffs of the intensely aromatic Mediterranean herb calm and relax you. Lavender’s soothing qualities are used in aromatherapy, beauty products and other spa treatments. Part sweet, part savory, a hint of lavender infuses food with the unforgettable taste of summer. Meet the best-performing lavender cultivars while you learn to grow, garden, cook and decorate your home with lavender.
For the Love of Roses
Tomorrow’s best-selling rose requires equal parts breeder’s alchemy and Disney-like showmanship. Introducing a new rose is not all that different from the lavish marketing campaigns of a new perfume. Are we captivated by a rose because of its bodacious bloom and intoxicating scent or are we dazzled by the emotional appeal of its romantic name. It’s probably a little bit of both, but like any consumer product, no matter how alluring the advertising campaign, if a rose isn’t successful in the landscape, it won’t withstand the competition or satisfy the gardener. Still, for all the new introductions, old roses live on. They grow companionably with cottage garden perennials or add charm to an arbor. They are passed from mother to daughter or shared in bouquets over the neighbor’s fence. |
Water-wise and Wonderful
Reduce the number of thirsty plants in your landscape. Some of the longest-blooming perennials are also drought-tolerant, which means you can enjoy a beautiful floral display while practicing good stewardship of local water resources. Low-water landscapes are anything but ordinary. You can have an eye-catching and ever-changing perennial garden without constantly watering it and wasting valuable resources. Select sustainable plant varieties that don’t require pampering, excess irrigation or chemical treatments. Consider a plant’s adaptability to your landscape, emphasizing four-season interest. And if you do have some high-water use plants, group them together to make your watering efforts more efficient.
The Garden Palette
Personalize your landscape with a splash of color. If you’re cheered by a room painted in a warm, effusive palette, you understand the inherent power of color. We intuitively sense that color influences our emotions, whether we’re in a soothing spa environment or an electrifying casino. Color influences our reaction to everything. In the landscape, our color choices create gardens that are romantic, playful, tranquil, exciting or nurturing. There is an added variable of natural light, which, depending upon the weather or climate can make quiet colors sing or turn down the volume on louder hues. The good news is that color is highly subjective. And since it’s so personal, you can design, plant and decorate your landscape with the shades of the rainbow that please your eye – and your mood.
Lose the Lawn
Being eco-savvy may mean giving up your front lawn, or at least reducing its size. American’s picture-perfect green carpet of grass is anything but low-maintenance. Lawns gobble up water, require frequent mowing, and depend upon fertilizers and pesticides to maintain their lush appearance. The alternative to a traditional lawn is to diversify your landscape. Reduce the overall area of turf in your yard, replacing it with native plants, mixed borders of ornamental grasses and perennials, or evergreen ground-covers. As your lawn shrinks, switch to push-mowers or energy efficient mowers and trimmers (such as new equipment that uses electricity and propane rather than gasoline).
Savvy Small Gardens
Do more with less and make the most of a postage-stamped sized gardening space, whether it’s a patio, deck, balcony or tiny yard. There’s plenty of room for bold design ideas in scaled-down spaces. As the lines between indoors and outdoors are blurred, areas of your landscape can assume a room-like appearance with furniture, fire pits and flower pots, all of which give small gardens the inviting sense of place.
Just Add Water
The presence of water in the landscape takes on a greater importance than ever before. It makes a perfect backdrop for gardens suited for both solitary and social pursuits. Whether you place an Asian dish rock to capture rainwater or stock a small pond with exotic Koi, the element of water should be a main ingredient to outdoor spaces. Even small landscapes should make room for water. You can have a bubbling urn or a tiny tabletop fountain. Water is elemental – it draws us into the garden. More gardeners than ever are considering water an essential aspect of their garden.
The Artful Garden
It’s important to choose and place ornamentation with a thoughtful eye toward your garden’s overall design. Garden décor should provide delight, but it shouldn’t compete with your plants. A well-placed sculpture adds to, rather than detracts from, the border’s appearance. Precious objects displayed side-by-side with foliage and flowers (or partially hidden among the stems and branches of a favorite plant) give a garden its personality. They also communicate volumes about the gardener’s own tastes and style. While there is no right or wrong in something as subjective as choosing artwork for your landscape, the general rules of scale and proportion, placement and balance, and harmonious composition are useful guidelines that anyone can follow.
Secrets of an Abundant Border
Break free of the traditional style of layering plants and rely on a relaxed approach to planting the flower border. Chances are you’ve lusted for the over-the-top mixed perennial borders seen in English gardens. Try a new approach to planting beds and borders with four techniques: Designing with strong plant forms; adding open-branching plants for a see-through quality; emphasizing the vertical elements with tall plants; and massing plants together to create drifts of color and texture.
Gardening Getaways
The garden shed is no longer hiding in a far corner of the yard. Owners are transforming this once-humble structure into a backyard sanctuary – a retreat – just steps from the porch. Cobwebs and spiders have been replaced by curtains and antiques; corrugated walls by cedar shingles and window boxes. Sheds have become as individualized as their owners, but the best of them fulfill three needs: function, recreation and inspiration. People want their own private place to go when the rest of the world doesn’t make sense, away from the calendar, away from appointments. The shed is an adult hideaway, a comfort zone, a quiet place for creative expression.
The Art of the Living Roof
Functional and lovely, these eco-friendly canvases are just beginning to spring up around on rooftops. Green roofs are artful, but they can also be part of a water management system in the landscape. Among its many benefits, an energy-efficient living roof can be beautiful to look at. Planted roofs are widely used in Europe and even in some American cities like Chicago, which has spent the past decade encouraging commercial and residential homeowners to mitigate high energy costs with planted roofs. But most residential rooftops are still sheltered by traditional tile, shingles or composite sheeting. Succulents are ideal for warm-weather green roofs because of their low-water requirements and heat-loving characteristics. Whether randomly planted or arranged in a pattern, the hardworking succulents grow quickly and cushion the roof of a patio, pool house or shed with lush, green textures. In cooler climates, roofs can be planted with sod or grasses for a meadow-like appearance.
Bulb Gardening 101
The promise of spring appears in fresh-green leaves emerging from the pointed tops of daffodil, tulip, hyacinth and amaryllis bulbs. Meet the best bulbs, sources, planting ideas and more. |
Debra is the author of five books, including Stylish Sheds and Elegant Hideaways (Clarkson-Potter/Random House, 2008), The Abundant Garden (2005), and Pacific Northwest Garden Survival Guide (2004).