Creating a Moon Garden

July 17, 2014

...t pollinators and other wildlife. Bornstein had a number of great tips for making a garden interesting at night: Consider color. White flowers, of course, will pop out under moonlight. But yellow flowers stand out even more. We’re lucky in Southern California to have a lot of native plants with silvery grey leaves (an evolutionary adaption of dry climate plants). Masses of silvery grey leaves stand out well at night. Include a contrasting backgrou...

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What does the loving landscape look like?

Mrs. Homegrown

April 16, 2015

Back to the Garden, Gardening

18 Comments

...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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The Theme of a Great Garden

Mr. Homegrown

March 21, 2014

Garden Design, Gardening

6 Comments

...und, taking us to the edible area as well as the new pollinator and Nature Gardens. This garden gave us so many ideas that we’re going to do several posts about it. One important design lesson I learned today is that great gardens have a theme. Designed by the landscape architecture firm of Mia Lehrer and Associates, the Natural History Museum’s garden subtly suggests the contents inside the museum: dinosaurs, prehistory and the passage of time. T...

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Rain Garden Update

Mr. Homegrown

March 17, 2021

Garden Design, Gardening, Native Plants

4 Comments

...he first few months of the year. Kelly has thought about treating the rain garden as a kind of rock garden and planting succulents amongst the river rock but has decided to try to let the plants along the top, such as the sages, cascade over the sides. Volunteer New Zealand Spinach (Tetragonia tetragonoides) She says, “Landscaping the pit is like 3D chess–it’s hard enough to plant a flower bed but this is harder because you have in the same space...

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De-Cluttering the Garden

Mr. Homegrown

February 12, 2015

Domesticus, Gardening, Tidying up

8 Comments

...gardening de-cluttering steps did I leave out? When do you more northerly gardeners do your garden de-cluttering? And a note on the photo which shows Kelly pruning our pomegranate tree. To her right is a cardoon and, at the bottom of the slope is a huge prickly pear cactus. Something all these plants have in common? Wicked thorns. This makes deferred de-cluttering even more curse-worthy. Addendum Mrs. Homegrown chimes in: Erik spoke of some topic...

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