Tag: Color & Texture
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Maria von Brincken Teaches Color Gardens at Mass Hort
Color Gardens: Learn to Create Three-Season Flower Gardens with Winter Appeal In this three-session tutorial course Maria von Brincken, landscape designer, will teach you how to use color and plants to design gardens filled with color from flowers and foliage. You’ll learn how to create beautiful plant combinations that flower from spring to…
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Gardening at Dawn on a Summer-Like Day

I love gardening at dawn on a summer morning. Cool enough to pull weeds, prune branches, deadhead, plant, lay mulch as I did this last weekend-of-May Sunday. Yet it’s warm enough for shorts and a tshirt. It’s a time of birdsong and quiet in the neighborhood. No noisy lawn mowers, leaf blowers, or power songs.…
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October Colorful Shrubs in New England
Mid-October in New England is the time of colorful shrubs. The green leaves of summer respond to cool temperatures and short days. To the left, the burgundy hued foliage of the ‘Mariessi’ viburnums and the “just-starting-to turn” Oakleaf hydrangeas wear their fall colors while the pink ‘Knock Out’ shrub rose continues to bloom. …
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A Leaf Lover’s Fall Foliage Combinations
I’m loving our New England Autumn. The leaves have been turning one by one– here and there– for weeks. Now it’s clumps of yellow, orange, and scarlet, and green gearing up to an amazing crescendo sometime soon. Here’s a few photos taken from my back garden. The garden’s fall foliage design shows off. Enjoy. And…
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Mellow August Garden
It’s August and the mid- season daylily party is over. Sitting in my shady retreat on the chaise on the patio I built under the deck, I’m enjoying the mellow August garden. A few of the late blooming hemerocallis varieties still contribute to the color, but the riot has ended. Stems have been clipped and composted, and…
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July Daylily Party
Daylilies, botanically known as hemerocallis, fill my July gardens with color and joy. The back gardens have a good twenty different varieties that bloom mid-summer. All the joyful colors make a happy garden. And, it’s not only the daylilies in bloom, but the hostas as well. Plus, you’ll notice the blue ballon flowers adding…
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Gardens — antidotes to the news

The garden is always there. You break your arm–struggle to keep up with work. But the garden is always there. The headlines here still speak of the Boston Marathon bombings, a broken Congress, terrible hurricanes in the Midwest, floods, and general mayhem. Those thoughts whirling in my head–I realized I needed to take time…
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Leaf Musings and Foliage Combinations
I think a lot about leaves. Even if I wasn’t a landscape designer, I would still think a lot about leaves. Guess that makes me a leaf lover! This spring, I enjoyed the progressing tapestry of new leaves in the woodland…
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Spring says Hello in Yellow
Here in the Northeast we were visited by another snow storm bringing our total since early February around 100 inches! Ninety something inches more than last year. But who’s counting? The news reports individuals who are angry with the Groundhog. Remember, this year the Groundhog predicted an early spring. Who can you trust? This morning…
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Enchanted by a Fleeting View
Darkness accompanied me as I trod downstairs to make my daily latte. A bit later, I climbed the day-lit stairs, and I was awestruck by the view created by last night’s snowfall. I marveled at myself because I thought I was tired of looking at snow. Yet there I was– captured by the beauty outside…