Sing it Carly! “Anticipation, anticipation/Is making me late/Is keeping me waiting.” Maybe Carly Simon was a horticulturist, because it strikes me lately that no one knows more about anticipation than a gardener. If you told me there’s any pursuit that is more about delayed gratification, about waiting for green dreams to be realized, about being just plain [...]
Garden photographers just love focal points designed into gardens. In great gardens though, they present dilemmas. What is the best angle ? Let’s take a stroll around one of the rooms in Gary Ratway’s own garden: Gary is one of those exceedingly rare landscape architects who knows more than 25 plants. Not only does he [...]
Hard to say if there’s any such thing as a foolproof garden design strategy, but the principle of repetition comes pretty darn close. The basic idea is simple: use something more than once. And when I say something, I really mean just about anything. You might use two or more of the same container, two or [...]
As a dedicated container gardener, my approach to gardening in pots is always evolving. I wrote about my thriller, filler and spiller recipe last season, and while I’m sticking with that basic approach, I find myself more inclined to create those kinds of combinations by using a grouping comprised of individual plants in their own [...]
Last month I started my seasonal orange bender. It being the color of all kinds of wonderful things, from mangoes to sunsets to campfire embers. I can’t get enough of it–in the garden or elsewhere. So I shared some of my favorite flowers and promised a return to the topic with a post on good [...]