Putting Your Civic House in Order: How the Young Members of the Family Help

...timate the far-reaching beneficent effects of this civic housecleaning and garden-making campaign. The general conclusions arrived at by the committee are: that the chief lesson of the garden-paying for things through work-is within the understanding of even young children. A contestant, a girl of thirteen who had had three years of instruction in a school garden, when asked what she was going to put in her home garden replied: “Well, my father is...

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Garden Design Trends: Interplanting and Plant Communities

...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’s a design aesthetic that mimics nature’s diversity, but in a somewhat more compressed form. The example...

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The Theme of a Great Garden

...d play out in a more modest home landscape. Perhaps, when it comes time to design a garden it would be useful to toss around a few abstract words and ideas to help unify the design vocabulary of the garden. Picking a theme or several related themes could make it easier when it comes to making plant and hardscpaping choices. Of course, the current theme of our garden is “Skunk Encounters.” We’re going to have a bunch of stinky school groups this sp...

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What does the loving landscape look like?

...ns? By the sea? It could also come in the shape of a food forest or a rain garden or even a water garden. Although the loving landscape doesn’t have to be an exclusively native landscape, a good place to start researching is with your local native plant society or in the native section of your local botanical gardens and local nature preserves. Using resources like this, you can get a feel for the vocabulary of your landscape. You may also want to...

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Lessons from the 2018 Theodore Payne Garden Tour

...cultural equivalent of the return of Destiny’s Child. Lush and traditional garden design even made a Jay-Z like cameo appearance at the stunning stunning Wilson/Leach garden in Altadena (seen above). Native plants gardens in Southern California don’t have to look like a desert! An ad in the back of the tour brochure neatly summed up the vibe: In: Architecture-Enhancing Designs Out: Boring Expanses of Lawn In: Vibrant Climate-Compatible Blooms Out:...

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