Search Results for: label/garden design/page/5/2011/04/making-it

768 results

How To Design a Garden Step I: Identifying Goals

Mr. Homegrown
Garden Design, Gardening
7 Comments
s space for native plants areas that are semi-wild and not often visited  space for the composting Think and meditate on your goals before drawing up a plan.  And for those of us in the urban homesteading movement, I think it’s important to measure productivity in more ways than just the amount of food you get from your yard.  How will the garden provide peace and well being? Educational opportunities? Ways to commune with nature? Some g...

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Garden Design Trends: Interplanting and Plant Communities

Mr. Homegrown
Garden Design, Gardening
4 Comments
The Daily Telegraph garden designed by Sarah Price. Landscape architect Thomas Rainer has a new post on his blog looking at some current garden design trends. Two of these trends intrigued me: what Rainer calls “interplanted everything” and another he calls “community gardens” (by which he means plant communities not allotments). Rainer says, “Massing is out.  Highly interplanted, mixed schemes are in.”  It...

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How To Design a Garden Step III: Pathways

Mr. Homegrown
Garden Design, Gardening
14 Comments
y Create wide paths with smaller branching paths. Think of the human circulatory system: Or fractal patterns found in nature, like tree branches: Now our property is so small that, when I’m done re-doing the backyard it will only have two main paths and one or two branching paths, but the path hierarchy concept is scalable to any piece of land large or small. Put paths where people walk Avoid what’s called in the landscape architec...

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How To Design a Garden Step IV: Clues to Care

Mr. Homegrown
Garden Design, Gardening
6 Comments
rm, or anything that looks too “wild.” Clues to care include: Defined pathways Raised beds Mulched beds and paths (vs. bare soil) Artwork Trellises and other attractive supports Birdbaths Benches While the above items fall under the category of hardscape, clues to care also include aesthetic choices in planting and arranging the yard. For instance, it’s never a bad idea to plant lots of flowers, even if you’re more inter...

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The Good Stuff at Dwell on Design

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
1 Comment
simply Planter which is avaliable on his website for $45. Ollas are ceramic jars buried in the ground to deliver a slow drip of water to plants. Roth’s design is elegant, simple and effective–take an olla and make it integral with a pot. Particularly on a hot day, conventional ceramic pots dry out quickly and Roth’s planter would be great on a hot balcony or porch. His teapot is also an object of great beauty. Scout Regalia...

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More on our gardening disasters

Mrs. Homegrown
Gardening, Mistakes, Thoughtstylings
15 Comments
We need to put the heart back into our garden. (Our Heart of Flax from way back in 2011) I thought I’d chime in on the subject of this year’s garden failures. Before I do, I’d like to thank you all for your kind advice and commiseration that you left on Erik’s post. First, I will agree that it really, truly has been a terrible year in the garden. Sometimes Erik gets a little melodramatic when it comes to the crop failure...

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Accidental Garden Design: Pomegranate and Prickly Pear

Mr. Homegrown
Garden Design, Gardening, Thoughtstylings
1 Comment
Can good garden design be taught or is it something you’re born with? If it’s inherited I didn’t get that gene, unfortunately. But at least a garden can sometimes put on a good show despite the gardener’s lack of design sense. Above, the view out our front window of our pomegranate tree (Punica granatum ‘Wondeful’) against our overgrown prickly pear cactus (Opuntia ficus-indica). These two plants have a lot...

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2011 in Review: The Garden

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
20 Comments
It’s was a difficult year in the garden. A lead and zinc issue screwed up my winter vegetables garden plans. At least we managed to find some river rocks and put in a path. I found this photo from December 2010. I was certainly a lot more organized that year. For 2012, I’m putting in raised beds to deal with the heavy metal issue and we’ve already planted more native plants. But most importantly one of my New Years resolution...

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Garden Design: Quantity vs. Quality

Mr. Homegrown
Design, Garden Design, Gardening
5 Comments
...that he most talented creative folks I’ve met crank out lots of material. So how do we apply the quantity over quality principle to laying out a garden–especially since you often get only one chance a year to get it right? Above you see some of Kelly’s ideas for the parkway garden we planted in the fall. I think it is at this first point in the process–when you’re just sketching out ideas–when it’s best...

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Piet Oudolf’s Enhanced Nature

Mr. Homegrown
Garden Design, Gardening
1 Comment
ilway turned into a park in New York City. Noel Kingsbury is a gardener and writer who has been the primary promoter of Oudolf’s work and what has come to be called naturalistic gardening or the “new style.” It’s an approach that’s more complex than it might seem at first glance. Oudolf walks a fine line between the public’s desire for “nature” and the untidiness of the real thing. Oudolf responds w...

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