It sometimes seems that garden writers are obsessed with the ‘off’ seasons in the garden. There are endless blogs on flowers for spring, color in fall, how to have winter interest, but summer seems to be forgotten. Yet that is the time when almost everyone is in their garden, enjoying a vacation at home, barbecuing, throwing parties, and having family gatherings. So surely that is…

When organizing the layout of plants in your garden, making the best and most exciting arrangement you can is the key to making the ordinary look extraordinary. Most plants are basically rounded, and the eye tends to pass quickly over them. What gets our attention is vertical lines. There are quite a few plants that are upright, and even narrow, but there are some that…

Almost every garden has shade – and even if it begins as sunny, once trees and large shrubs develop, shady areas are almost inevitable. We can treat shade in two ways, as a problem, or as an opportunity. Once we see it as an opportunity to grow plants that prefer or even require shade, a whole world opens up to us. Once we start looking…

Bringing living green inside your house is a great way to improve your indoor space. Not only do plants add that special something to your rooms, softening the sharp angles of furniture, and filling corners effectively, but multiple studies have shown their amazing ability to remove polluting chemicals from the air. With plants in it, the air inside your home will be cleaner, and be…

When we look at the huge range of different trees and shrubs available for our gardens, we take it as a given that something new is always coming along – the latest variety of rose, like the arrival of the Knockout Rose, or the exciting twice-blooming Encore Azaleas. Like the latest models of our phones and computers, we see this as a normal thing, and…

When choosing plants for the garden, the words shade-tolerant, or grows in shade are regularly seen. The true situation with shade is a little more complicated than that, and a better understanding of the various kinds of shade found in gardens is helpful in making good choices, and avoiding costly failures. Let’s think about the different kinds of shade, and their impacts on the growth…