Check out the amazing benefits of vinegar in the garden plus the awesome chemistry behind why it works well for so many things!
Use these secret garden ideas to design a magical hidden backyard oasis that you'll want to relax in all summer long.
The weather is FINALLY starting to warm up, and I'm itching to get out in my flower beds and start digging! We live on a few acres with a small greenhouse and lots of places for pretty flowers and vegetable gardens. It takes a lot of work, but working outside on a summer night is like therapy to me. . Here are some ide
Need a little #gardeninspo? Here are 9 creative ways to add personality, style and interest to any size garden or outdoor space.
These pics would make any Hobbit proud, that’s for sure.
Making your own fairy garden is easy and fun. These are the best ideas to inspire you and make you start one immediately.
On a budget? Don't miss these tips for gardening when you are broke! Tons of amazing ways to keep your garden full without breaking the bank!
In this list, you are allowed to take some of the nicest and sweetest -I think- edible garden ideas that you can share with your grandmom somewhere away from your place
Creating a fairy garden in your own backyard is a delightful way to add a touch of enchantment to your outdoor space.
The whimsical garden trend wants you to get creative in your landscape with bright colors, unexpected plants, and quirky decorations—here's how to do it.
Cottage backyard ideas offer a feast for the senses. Be inspired to turn your garden into a relaxed and inviting oasis
You want to be the best you can be when it comes to gardening. This is important because you want to be able to proudly show off your garden to anybody that comes to your house. This article is for you because it will provide some great free advice to help you out. When planting next season's vegetable garden, it is important to rotate some of the crops. For example, potatoes and tomatoes should be planted in a different spot because they are both prone to the same diseases. Keep your vegetable garden healthy and thriving by learning which crops need rotating and why. When planting a garden there should always be space reserved for essential kitchen herbs. These are available either fresh or dried in the grocery stores and are always expensive. Mint, parsley, basil, dill all can be grown in almost any climate. Also, these herbs are very easy to grow and can be used on a daily basis in the kitchen, and what is not used can be dried and stored for later use. If you want to grow roses, you should look into the different species. If you are a beginner, select a kind of rose that does not require a lot of maintenance. You can also get into competitions with extremely delicate roses. Make sure you choose roses that are adapted to your skills and experience. Clean your garden tools before you put them away. It seems strange to worry about keeping a gardening tool clean, but it's actually very important for the health of your plants. Tools that are put away while coated in dirt can harbor microbes and even insects that can be deadly to your plants. To avoid injuring yourself while gardening, be sure to do some warm-up stretches before starting your project. Most people may not think of gardening as exercise, but injuries like pulled muscles frequently occur in the garden. You should also be sure to move around and not stay in one position for a long period of time. Mulching around your plants is a great water saving tip. You can use purchased mulch, but it is easy to make your own from what you find in your yard. Use fallen leaves, pine cones, sticks, and tree bark, and lay them out heavily around your plants on the dirt so that water does not evaporate so easily after you water. In conclusion, these are a few of the most important tips available for gardening. Go ahead and give them a try and you should be happy with your turnout. Hopefully, this will give you not only knowledge, but also the confidence to do your best in the garden. Related Posts: Tweet
Use these secret garden ideas to design a magical hidden backyard oasis that you'll want to relax in all summer long.
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Good old-fashioned hard work and choosing hardy plants that can withstand drought and frost has seen this garden in Pipers creek, Victoria, Transformed into a true beauty.
If you want a romantic, magical garden, check out our cottage landscaping ideas. With the right plants and paths, a cottage garden can be yours.
For the last 5-10 years gardening with raised beds has seemingly been the most popular method of backyard gardening. It has been purported to solve…
Cottage style gardens are wildly popular today and tend to be lower maintenance than their formal counterparts. See how easy it is to add cottage style.
Sometimes quitness will give you inspiration and peace. Retreat for a moment in a secret garden is one of the things you can do to enjoy the quiteness. Moreover, it can be identified with green scenery and fresh air that will refresh your mind. Then, what secret garden design do you want to fulfill your desire? These are the image of ideas to inspire you.
Learn what you need to do before you begin your homesteading venture. Planning is key to your success.
Want a lush garden? Join the club, who doesn't! You can have a lush feel to your garden space if you follow a few guidelines, show a little bit of patience, and take care of your plants needs the right way. Here's how to make a lush secret garden that is all yours!
An Illinois master gardener shares her advice for taming a difficult landscape.
On one side of my home, we have a pathway made with flagstone. it is truly one of my favorite parts of my landscape. the walkway has been...
Explore loweryjes' 5075 photos on Flickr!
We are in the process of creating a backyard pond for our ducks and I want to take you on this journey with me and share with you some of the pictures that inspire me. I envision a beautiful Chateau worthy fountain garden pond that has an old world vibe and looks as if it […]
Avoid these common gardening missteps and save time, money, and natural resources.
A vertical garden makes excellent use of garden space. So, read on these amazing vertical gardening ideas to help you grow upwards in style. Find it here!
Perennial Garden Design. Our one-click garden design service for quick, cost-effective and smart growing solutions. Here we have a fantastic perennial garden design, aimed at people who want a low maintenance, high fruiting and flowering garden. Based on the average 8 by 20 meter urban garden, this design will survive in most soils (although best for 6-8 ph) and zones USDA 6-9 or UK Hardiness H4-H7. In this design you will receive: • 50 hardy plants with botanical and common names. • A clearly annotated garden design What is permaculture? Permaculture, 'permanent agriculture', is an ecological design system that creates abundant results because of its regenerative practises. Inspired by the principles and methods of natural eco-systems, we create designs that heal the soil, produce high yields of fruit, medicine and other necessary ingredients for a thriving environment for all types of landscapes and scenarios of life. Whats the benefits of using our permaculture garden designs? • Low Maintenance In natures designs, there is a job for everything. The leaves provide the soil with nitrogen, the plants trade nutrients and everything is recycled back into the eco-system in a miraculous closed-loop system with no inputs needed expect for the natural life-cycles and elements. Therefore, when we use natures methods of thriving to create sustainable landscape designs, little maintenance is needed. Ideally, the system will completely maintain itself, however, there will be some maintenance depending on the type of system but compared to traditional gardens where all the plants are only chosen aesthetically and need huge inputs from weekly gardeners to outsourced fertilisers, PERMACULTURE SYSTEMS ARE MUCH LESS WORK. • High yielding in fruits, veg and flowers You can expect higher yielding results because your eco-system is working as a team, co-operating, trading and thriving with one another. This is because the right plants have been chosen for the specific climate, soil and guild (Group of plants). When the intelligence of permaculture is applied to garden design, nature flourishes quickly and abundantly because all the plants are in the right place, contributing their unique benefits to an environment the needs them. • Improves soil health, biodiversity and production You may or may not know that plants have special powers. Some plants fix nitrogen from the air, into the soil, some air-rate the soil so fungi, insects and water can move freely and some dig deep down in the soil, bringing up necessary minerals and nutrients to trade with other plants. Permaculture design emphasises the importance of choosing the right plants for the specific eco-system, asking, what does the soil need? How can we improve biodiversity? What plants/trees are needed to create a thriving, low maintenance eco-system here? When we know our environment, we know the right plants to integrate and when we know that, we can heal the earth. We can create a THRIVING PLANET WITH PERMACULTURE. • Regenerative eco-system design In permaculture you will hear regeneration a lot. This is because our eco-systems are degrading in nutrients, biodiversity, soil fertility and much more... You can probably taste it in your food by now. Chemical fertilzers, traditional farming methods, pollution (I can go on) are just some of the many causes of this. The good news? Permaculture rejuvenates! Reversing the effects of mistreatment to the earth and penetrating it with a healing landscape design that radically improves all aspects of the environment. • Aesthetically Beautiful Landscapes We always ensure our designs are beautiful, but it's not difficult since we are using the same methods and principles as nature. And let's be honest, nature is breathtakingly beautiful. Have you ever experienced a forest? And to think most forests have NO-INPUTS, and if they do its only minimal like paths and outdoor spaces like view points. But the actual forest does not need fertilisers or added organic matter to help it thrive in it's beauty. Unlike the practises of traditional gardening which needs the heavy resources to account for the mis-placement of plants and therefore, the lack of nutrients in the soil.
Horticulturist Charlie Harpur investigates why cottage gardens are so close to our hearts, and the best plants to create your own.
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Good day and congratulate your self because our Great God Almighty has met you with these awesome wire garden fencing ideas. Embrace it and share it
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How to create your landscape? Do you have a vision of it in your head? You've begun. First visions are mostly quaintly wrong, with a sweetness of effort, childlike in obvious desire, with no awareness of the complexities, across myriad layers, yet within, your deepest soul knows what is good, and can create a beautiful landscape, once it informs the brain, "unlearn your assumptions." . Describing myself, above. . What happened? Went back to college for a horticulture degree, still not learning how to design pretty gardens, instead 'the-machine' taught how to design residential gardens with every layer, lawn-shrubs-annuals-fertilizers-chemicals, saturated in the hype they must be tended by a man in a truck arriving weekly, and you pay him monthly. Landscape as commodity, Nature removed. . Decades later, after studying beautiful historic gardens across Europe, the patterns/templates/math/simplicities of beautiful good gardens, surfaced, and spoke. With pride, I can say, no garden I design is original they've all been done before, and proven themselves across centuries, and cultures. More than working with the owners of gardens, long dead, and their garden designers, I know I am working with their muse. Landscape design is not voodoo or 'feelings' it is a path of science, elevated into art. Simplicities strung together. . Then, a big event, teaching me, after years of delighting within gorgeous landscapes, they are merely sparkly ephemerals, pure amusement. Beloved gave me 8 heirloom chics, less than a week old, for my birthday, along with a custom built Chinoiserie coop/run. Once they were large enough they were taken from their garage kennel and put into their coop in my lovely mature garden. Walking away, that first time, a new awareness made me stop and look at my garden with fresh eyes. A new concern, the chicks. I had to keep them alive, healthy, happy. Stewardship. Yet it was hardly one sided. The chicks, aside from eggs, give pleasure in their antics, sounds, even how they walk, yet more. Somehow, they work in stewardship of me, greater than I for them. Finally, Nature's circle. Took me a few decades, but I connected the dots. G*d almighty first planted a garden. Men come to build sooner than to garden finely as if gardening were the greater art..... for sure. . Metaphors of the bible are writ large tending livestock. Who knew? Rare I'm in the chicken coop and they don't make me laugh. Hen pecked, pecking order, the cliches roll deeper, but chickens aren't my topic, will stop here with the chics. Getting back to simplicities. . Gardens are designed in order of garden math. An equation, Trees + paths/lawn/meadow/hardscape + focal points + shrubs + perennials/herbs/groundcovers = Beautiful easy landscape. Trees/large shrubs, especially, must be placed to reduce HVAC expenses. Include blooms/berries/fall color to cover entire year, add mystery & delight. Gardens are installed in this order too. Contrast every element, big leaves next to small leaves, rustic/formal, etc. Create garden rooms, start your garden design from inside, looking into your garden. Know how to break the rules of the garden design equation. Don't choose plants you love/adore, choose plants that love/adore the site. Your home is involved too, paint colors, lighting, views into windows, style of interior/exterior furnishings must flow. There you have it, every garden design simplicity. . The genius involved is trusting the simplicities and ignoring the genius-of-the-lizard-brain. A client's farm gave the opportunity to site a barn into a similar setting, below. And, guess what we did? The view remains the same, no barn in view. We created mystery, and delight sighting the barn into its own world, ever so close to the pristine pasture. Via Pentreath-Hall, above. Can you 'read' the perennial garden below? Total formulaic, in use for centuries. Perennials backdropped with large shrubs, and low meadow/lawn in front, contrasting flower shapes spikey/round, and the obligatory focal point urn/sundial/bench. . About a decade ago I stopped doing so many perennials, using flowering shrubs instead. Why? Deer, drought/flood, dead-heading, dividing, down time. Perennials seemed gorgeous, but not able to pay their rent. Want to enjoy your garden, keep it low maintenance? Shrubs instead of perennials, mostly. Pic by Clive Nichols, above. Poems are an intensification of reality, hence, good landscapes are poems. There was a lovely poem in Women's Voices for Change recently, I know nothing about writing poems or poetry, including this wonderful description, of a poem, below. Really, iambic pentameter, hexameter, traditional sonnet meters, the poem turns like a sonnet, proportionately correspondent, patterned end rhyme, and more, just really? How I would love to have a long leisurely lunch in a cafe garden with a real poet. Paper/pen at hand. Connecting the formation of a poem into its parallel of a garden. Might as well invite a musician to that lunch, poems & gardens are songs too. Would want the chef at table in conversation with us good landscapes are a recipe.....you get the idea. From, Women's Voices for Change, below. Although this poem is written in modern free verse, my (admittedly sensitive) sonnet-radar detects in it a ghost of that centuries-old form. To begin with, anytime a poem is close to 14 lines (this one is 16), I have to wonder. Although “Kanpur” is not strictly metered, I found myself able to scan the first ten lines as iambic pentameter and the last six as hexameter, both traditional sonnet meters. More compellingly, the poem turns in the same places I’d expect a sonnet to turn. Lines 10 and 11 (proportionately correspondent with the 8th or 9th lines where voltas reside in Petrarchan sonnets) express a turn in consciousness, a shocked recognition that events once deemed “trivial” actually have “vast importance.” The poem’s last two lines (analogous to a Shakespearian sonnet’s closing couplet) contain an actual, physical turn in the phrase describing how Leo “turned on us.” Finally, the poem does make very subtle use of the patterned end-rhyme conventionally seen in sonnets. Lines 1, 6, 11, and 14 terminate in near-rhymes (late/not/night/out), with exactly five lines between the second and third instances and three lines between the third and last instance. The end word “night” gains resonance from another near-rhyme in that line, “late” in “late at night.” A second series of end rhyme occurs in lines 13 and 16, concluding with “know” and “Leo,” respectively. Moreover, as in line 11, line 16 saturates and intensifies its end-rhyme with a proximate internal rhyme: “Leo was the first to go. It began with Leo.” How fascinating—and devastating—that the sound emphasized here at the end of the poem is the archetypal human utterance of shock and grief: “O.” The poem describes an event that is a turning point in the larger journey, the moment when things begin to fall apart, and this function is supported by its placement almost exactly in the middle (34th of 63 poems) in the book. As such, it performs a dramatic function in the larger text. Is this function also reflected in the poem’s genre or mode? I see it as predominantly narrative, with the speaker looking back and telling a story about an event in his or her past, but with lyrical (those sound repetitions) and dramatic elements (the foreshadowing and suspense that close the poem). In the end, “Kanpur” defies characterization as lyric, narrative, or dramatic and reminds us that when done well, the blending of poetic genres can produce an amalgam of story, music, and tension as compelling as any work of fiction, and I admire the poem for the way it makes me want to read on, to keep turning the pages of the book, SERIES / INDIA." Pic, above, by Clive Nichols Formal meeting rustic, above. Mystery. I want to see the house belonging to this gate, and investigate its meadows/woods. Delight. "The game is just to copy things, no more." — Matt Ridley in Mendel's Demon First rule of landscape design, copy. I thought this rule, horrible, because my garden designs must be original. Glad I got over myself and 'original'. Here's the thing about copying, no 2 sites are the same, hence you get original each time you copy. Pic, above, by Clive Nichols. Create garden rooms, above. Welcome, come in. Have a talk with your future landscape. Seriously. Frame the negotiation, below. Time, money are constraints to each landscape, lose this excuse, everyone has it. How can you overcome lack of time/money? Frame the negotiation. You are the deal maker, and your landscape is making a deal with you in return. What do you each bring to the table? Zero difference here between designing a garden or making a business deal. From the Harvard Business Review, below. Control the Negotiation Before It Begins by Deepak Malhotra "...the costliest mistakes take place before negotiators even sit down to discuss the substance of the deal. That’s because people fall prey to a seemingly reasonable—but ultimately faulty—assumption about deal making. Negotiators often take it for granted that if they bring a lot of value to the table and have sufficient leverage, they’ll be able to strike a great deal. While those things are certainly important, many other factors influence where each party ends up." Pic, above, Clive Nichols. At the start I thought landscapes were about plants. Partially, landscapes are about plants. Landscapes are about you living your life. Focal points, pots, furnishings, above, are part of the landscape. Beauty is a landscape component, so is comfort. And entertaining friends, with ease. ********************************************** I've never had a client who couldn't tell me exactly what they want in their garden. Though they could not tell themselves. Does this make sense? All my clients/students understand the language of a beautiful easy landscape, yet cannot speak it. Why? Mostly, the lizard brain. They've turned from listening to their heart and listened to the lizard brain mentioning a landscape needing significant upfront expense plus a man in a truck coming each week. What kind of thinker are you? Keep the lizard brain in check, let the knowledge of your heart speak and be heard. COLLABORATION What Kind of Thinker Are You? Mark Bonchek and Elisa Steele For example, on the big picture or macro orientation: Explorer thinking is about generating creative ideas. Planner thinking is about designing effective systems. Energizer thinking is about mobilizing people into action. Connector thinking is about building and strengthening relationships. Across the micro or detail orientation: Expert thinking is about achieving objectivity and insight. Optimizer thinking is about improving productivity and efficiency. Producer thinking is about achieving completion and momentum. Coach thinking is about cultivating people and potential. Pic, above, Clive Nichols. Loving a meadow mowed at different heights, above, has been a chief pleasure. Decades later I discovered having this type meadow in landscapes increases pollinator habitat, increasing crop/fruit tree yields, healthier livestock. More, I discovered, having trees, meadows & garden rooms combined, or this could be said as 'high density/low density', are maximum pollinator habitat. Then chickens arrived, and I learned Nature had been using me in her methodologies all along. The ultimate bit of humor, I have been no greater, or less, than a bee, or possum, going about their lives, part of the bigger picture of Nature. When Nature is healthy, we are. I find my greatest pleasure, and so my reward, in the work that precedes what the world calls your success. Thomas Edison Pic, above, Clive Nichols. Clive Nichols photography has been used with intent in this post. Aside from his skills with the camera, he chooses the best gardens to use those skills. Rusticities of the foreground, above, contrast perfectly with the formal stone folly focal point. Low meadow encircled with trees/shrubs, maximum pollinator habitat of high density/low density. . How to take charge of your landscape? Copy. Use the best ideas proven over centuries. Use plants loving your zone/micro climate not plants you love. Choose plants deer resistant and needing little water and zero chemicals. Follow the Landscape Design Equation, above, and install in that order too. After copying, repetition is a potent tool. Choose a minimal team of plants, repeat, repeat, repeat. Include your home in the plan, its paint colors, light fixtures, views into windows, hardware, interior furnishings style & colors. . And, if you're planting bulbs or annuals, the rule is this, If you can count the number of flowers you do not have enough. . I've taught a 4 week class for decades at the Atlanta Botanical Garden, all of the above, and more, are in those 4 weeks, slide shows included. Taught horticulture at the local college for years too. . Nothing about taking charge of your landscape is difficult. Nothing. It's merely an assimilation of all the right things. . Now, with the, above, you have the macro tools needed to take charge of your landscape. . Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
Edible edges are easy! Pop in edible plants that look decorative and provide harvestable crops along the edges of the garden for an attractive foodscape.
I've always wanted a beautiful garden. In my vision I'm about ten or fifteen years older, maybe some gray hair streaks here and there, and I'm in my garden pruning, potting, digging, and watering. While I love traveling and seeing new places, I'm much more of a homebody. So if we're not road-trippin
My collaborative Pinterest board is a special place to have fun with beautiful, inspiring pictures. So far 100 people have now accepted an invitation to pin!
The weather is FINALLY starting to warm up, and I'm itching to get out in my flower beds and start digging! We live on a few acres with a small greenhouse and lots of places for pretty flowers and vegetable gardens. It takes a lot of work, but working outside on a summer night is like therapy to me. . Here are some ide
