To preserve an old live oak, homeowner Stephanie Dixon reimagined traditional outdoor living spaces for her Georgia home.
Here are 8 ideas that will revamp your front yard on a budget!
These clever garden renovation ideas will help you add more interest to your landscape—and make it easier to maintain, too.
You may have seen on Instagram that we've been sharing some inspiration for our landscaping renovation! Thanks to the massive Texas snow-maggedon this past February, we were finally pushed to tackle the yard...
Five simple DIY ways to add welcoming cottage curb appeal to your house and landscaping, no matter its age, with before and after photos.
Whether you are in a summer home or your year-round home, check out these summer cottage garden plans. They'll have your front yard cottage-cozy in no time!
Over 350 seasoned gardeners were asked... What is the #1 thing you wish you'd known before landscaping your front yard? Here are there responses.
Learn how you can get your garden off the ground in no time, which is especially important in a highly noticeable area like a front yard.
A jaw-dropping casual path winding across a superb mix of drought resistant and salt friendly plantings. This naturalistic, colorful and low maintenance scene has been brilliantly created by Lankford Associates Landscape Architects, using 3 drought resistant perennials, a long-lasting blooming shrub and a couple of ornamental grasses.
These clever garden renovation ideas will help you add more interest to your landscape—and make it easier to maintain, too.
Design articles are always guiding us into the various ways to refresh a room, let's switch it up and do the same for the garden. 1. PRUNE This is one of my clients who called asking for some pruning. On my! I personally love to prune when a major renovation is required, believing anything can be re-shaped and saved. While the crew was busy, I pulled out the shears Yes, there was an entryway and an address. 2. EDGING AND MULCH Can I say mandatory? Looks clean and fresh, represses weeds and retains moisture Look for the best mulch you can afford, preferably black and fine. We use LEAF mulch, decomposed leaves, rich, black and finely ground. When laid, any mulch will begin to decompose. As wood mulch decomposes, that process robs the soil of nutrients. As leaf mulch goes, it feeds the soil, improving it's texture and adding nutrients Unless you reside at a Shell station, this is a big NO! Ugly, and the dyes are toxic 3. Stabilize structures and paint if needed In winter climes, snow and ice takes it's toll on our structures. Examine closely for needed repairs. A fresh coat of paint does wonders! 4. Clean, and/or replace outdoor soft goods What a renaissance for outdoor pillows; the fabrics and the designs. We carry a line whose style matches any interior pillow, some with gorgeous fringe, trim and down inserts! The rug line we carry, Dash and Albert, has a tremendous outdoor collection. New for 2014 is the collaboration with Bunny Williams, above 5. Declutter It can happen.......one day you are bringing home ornamentation, the next you are in a newspaper, misguided, posing and smiling Benches, table, fountain, watering cans.......complimentary to each other and tastefully arranged. Look around, what might be redundant, in disrepair......generally employ a good edit 6. Re access your front door Charming? Massively so if you live in a cottage, in Czechoslovakia. Enter your home as a guest would, is all clean? Decluttered? In good repair and painted or stained? Outdoor lamps sparkling clean? Consider a color change, this focal point for your home can be unassuming or exciting 7. Give up on low performing plants "I hate to kill plants!" I do too. Often as a landscape designer I am both executioner and nurturer. There are times when a plant is simply "taking up space", overgrown and beyond pruning (not too often), a blob, that is it just sits there, offering little No focus, many blob type plants, all green, no stand-outs and yes, a few weeds To live in my garden, the criteria is; must be of appropriate size must be interesting most of the growing season must be a strong performer; long bloom, colorful foliage, multi-seasonal interest I'm ruthless..... This Hydrangea above is the Incrediball, in bloom from early June to frost....nice! 8. Interesting foliage? Take a close look. Have a section where there is too much green? (disregard if all green is your goal, lovely in a formal setting). Too many leaves of the same size and shape? Insert some of the colorful foliage plants and pay close attention to the shape, mixing it up. 9. Consider the addition of Annuals To me, they are the link for a garden. They perform throughout the season weaving in and out of perennials and shrubbery that have their day until next year 10. Reevaluate your containers Are they in good order? Remove old soil, which no longer has any nutrients, and refill. How about their style and size, appropriate? Charming? YES! Appropriately sized? NO, too small That's better. Take note of the terra cotta color, which pulls from the homes bricks....nice! One of our clients. When we designed the gardens, instead of a pair of urns at the front entrance, we placed oversized, statement urns in front of the two front windows. Enjoyed from inside and out, they make a statement as they are planted fresh, four times a year, celebrating each new season. Cheers! Debra
Thoughts about our garden. “We desire,” the Emporer dictated, “that in the garden there should be all kinds of plants.” Charlemagne the Great I do a lot of writing about gardens, but our own personal garden has never been the subject of this blog. Our garden is always a backdrop to my thinking about gardens and gardening—a sort of character in my story whose face is never revealed. There are many reasons for this: first, our garden is just in the process of being established; I’m a terrible photographer and our garden is surrounded on three sides by unattractive roads and on one side by our unattractive house; and mostly because the act of gardening feels profoundly personal to me. It was designed for us, for our own pleasure, so the idea of opening for public consumption is a bit terrifying to me. BEFORE: The garden area when we bought the house. But I love other blogs that openly share their own gardens. James Golden’s View from Federal Twist is a brilliant blog about two wonderful gardens. That James bears his own soul through the garden is a source of endless inspiration to me. I’m just not that brave. And Scott Weber’s Rhone Street Garden is another fantastic blog. Scott transforms his small garden into and endless expanse through the lens of his camera. Through his images, I see and enjoy Scott’s garden much in the way he probably does. Nasella tenuissima and Salvia 'Caradonna' So in homage to other bloggers who bravely open their own gardens to public scrutiny, I am adding a few images of our own “in-process” garden. This spring marks two full years since I began smothering a triangular wedge of lawn in our sunny side yard. This area was too small to be a usable lawn, and too close to the road to be an enjoyable outdoor use area, so it seemed like a practical area for a garden. The sipping terrace which my brother-in-law calls the "duck blind" in late summer The house we bought was a neglected mid-century ranch which we essentially gutted, so my wife and I have poured our resources and time into renovating the house room by room. The only way to afford the renovation was to do everything ourselves, so that has left little time and money for the garden. The assembly of plants—and assembly is a much more accurate term than design—is a result of what we could get cheaply, what we could divide, what was available, and what would survive the mid-summer heat and humidity. This approach is probably entirely familiar to most gardeners, yet entirely problematic from my point of view as a designer. The garden becomes a product of impulse purchases and ad hoc decisions, not careful planning. Kniphofia 'Salley's Comet' with Pleioblastus viridistriatus, Nepeta "Walker's Low' and Eschscholzia californica But I’ve decided to embrace this non-designed approach. Design has its limitations, too. Any designer who has ever installed a garden, walked away, and then visited that garden five years later learns that design is not a singular vision set to paper; design is a thousand of little decisions and actions made through the life of the garden. Iris 'Persian Berry', one of the most exquisite colors I've ever seen With no real design to speak of, the garden has only a sort of guiding philosophy: plant only that which gives us pleasure. To use an admittedly pretentious term, our garden is a sort of “pleasaunce” by default, an archaic term for pleasure-garden. The concept of a pleasure garden is a bit antiquated these days. We are now much more likely to call non-food bearing gardens ornamental gardens. But “ornamental” is such a poor descriptive phrase. Who picks plants like they would pick wallpaper? To match their exterior trim? The worst gardens are those that aim to be merely decorative. No, we pick plants to live with us because they give us pleasure. I was recently re-acquainted with the idea of pleasure gardens when I re-read one of my favorite garden books, Rose Standish Nichols’ English Pleasure Gardens. It is a book I often pick up, read a chapter, and then put it away for a while. This century-old book is a compelling story of the English garden as viewed through three centuries of garden history. Throughout the book, one theme keeps emerging throughout the millennia: gardens exist for our pleasure. Christopher Lloyd’s writings have also been an inspiration of late. Perhaps I’ve spent too many years designing gardens, too many years of balancing client’s desires with safe plant selections. I love the almost garish quality of Dixter’s Long Border. The way it thumbs its nose at “tasteful” gray, pink, and blue color harmonies. The way it mixes tropicals, shrubs, perennials into one boisterous expression. Like Dixter, I would love a garden dedicated to nothing but horticultural craftsmanship. ''Beware of harboring too many plants in your garden of which the adjectives graceful and charming perpetually spring to your besotted lips,'' Lloyd warns as he clutches a black-leafed Canna. I love that. Dixter’s great triumph (and perhaps its downfall) is that it employs every tool in the planter’s toolkit all at once. The result is a hot mess, but one of the purest expressions of horticultural exuberance I’ve ever known. And what a joy that is. Cotinus 'Royal Purple' center (coppiced yearly), Savlia sclarea, Miscanthus 'Morning Light' and Alliums Perhaps all gardening is an attempt to re-create Eden, but our garden has absolutely no paradisiacal qualities. As a result of its placement next to an ugly house and an ugly road, we’ve adopted a more postlapsarian style. In the border, we have an ecumenical selection of wetland plants, desert grasses, South African bulbs, native forbs, and color foliage shrubs. Anything goes as long as it goes. The other side of our yard, we are beginning another more restrained garden evocative of a woodland edge. But in the border, there is no room for restraint, only more and more plants. Nasella tenuissima, Salvia 'Caradonna' and Allium 'Purple Sensation' In this blog, I am often guilty of heaping too much meaning on gardens, burying a simple act under too many metaphors. Perhaps it is an effort to justify my own profession, to add more significance to my calling than actually exists. If a garden exists simply for our own pleasure, what then? Perhaps that is enough. All I know is that gardening is hard work that reveals many agonies and few ecstasies. So despite the garden’s many flaws and failings, when the afternoon sun hits a patch of Feather grass and silhouettes the violet stems of Salvia ‘Caradonna’, it is enough for me. For now, I am pleased. Phlomis tuberosa and Hibiscus 'Fantasia' The ever ubiquitious, but entirely useful Spiraea 'Goldflamme' with Zahara Zinnias Our native-ish garden, planted this srping.
Get inspired by this post on cottage garden planning as well as ideas on how you can get this beautiful cottage look yourself!
