Tag: Custom Garden Design
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Patio Garden Make-Over Blends Old with New
Here’s one of my recently completed projects – a patio garden make-over after a kitchen and family room renovation. I love it when existing clients call me when they are doing a renovation. I already know their garden style, family lifestyle, how they use and enjoy their landscape, color palette, and the land’s orientation to sun and shadow. (Of…
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Take a Moment for Wonder
Check off the Design boxes Function, Horticulture, and Beauty to set the stage for a moment of wonder—even in winter.
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Stunning Perennial and Shrub Combinations
Often gardeners grow really beautiful plants well, but they don’t look like much. That’s because they’re just randomly plunked in the garden or at look that way. Gardeners don’t think about creating stunning perennial and shrub combinations. Usually it’s because the flowering perennial or shrub lacks a contrasting background that also may enhance the color.…
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Well-Designed Entry Gardens: Healthy, Welcoming, and Beautiful
A well-designed Entry Garden welcomes you, your family, and guests daily. It’s the place you trek through on car or foot to gather the mail and perhaps the newspaper. It’s the first place you see when you return home and the last place as you travel to work, school, or wherever. It’s beauty can cheer, soothe,…
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Color Starved? Enjoy these Plant Combinations
Mid February in New England finds us color starved. We’ve seen enough white. Piles of snow cover our landscapes and line our roads. We’ve received over 6 ft of snow in the last two weeks. Enough! I hope these images of spring and summer plantings help.
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Marsala Colors my Day
Aren’t these peonies luscious? The burgundy wine pink Marsala, Pantone’s 2015 color pick, is embodied in these peony selections. These yummy visions are from “Peony’s Envy” collection. I can envision them growing in my garden and enlivening my vases. I need such feast for the eyes and soul this freezing Mid-January day. The wind chill factor creates…
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Book Review: ‘The Bartlett Book of Garden Elements’
‘The Bartlett Book of Garden Elements: A Practical Compendium of Inspired Designs for the Working Gardener’ by Michael Valentine Bartlett & Rose Love Bartlett David R. Godine, Boston 2014 $40.00US ISBN 978-1-56792-426-8 When I think of garden elements, images of containers and benches come to mind. The Bartlett’s expanded that notion immediately. In over 1000…
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Autumnal Pink: Alternate Palette
Orange, vermilion, scarlet, burgundy, and yellow–they’re the colors we usually associate with the fall garden palette. We rarely think about pink. As I walked within my garden this morning less than twelve hours from the Fall Equinox, I realized the predominant flower color is pink. And…
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Making a Bird and Fish Pond
Pictures tell the story of making this bird and fish pond and waterfall garden. It took a team of contractors, machines, a pond expert, and myself as the designer directing the placement of every stone and every plant. The concept was to build a natural looking pond. It was important…
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Masses of Yellow: Antidote to a Gloomy Day
Winter seems to be dragging along. It’s late April, but feels and looks like March. The antidote to the gloom appears to be the bright yellow of the massed planting of the Forsythia shrubs. It adds a glow to these driveway gardens that I designed when one psychologically needs it most–in the drab days of…