Inspired ideas for garden and landscape design.

Fall Leaves In A Cut Glass Vase

Great Decorating Ideas With Fall Leaves

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What’s more beautiful than fall foliage? Here are a few understated ways to use it to decorate your home.

 

Fall Leaves In A Cut Glass Vase

 

FREE & EASY | Whether it’s branches in vases or individual leaves strewn along a dining table or on top of a napkin or plate, nothing looks more striking than nature brought indoors and left in its beautiful, natural state. Around here, we subscribe to a natural, casual approach when it comes to arranging botanical materials, and a less is more strategy for tabletop décor. Read more

Hempel Hotel garden, London, England

How To Get Edges Right In Your Garden

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Garden boundaries always stand out—the trick is weaving them gracefully into the style of your garden.

Hempel Hotel garden, London, England

 

DESIGN RIGHT | Of all the important elements of garden design, edges receive the least amount of attention in print. “Since edges are drawn wherever contrasting materials meet, almost anything you do in the garden results in an edge,” wrote James Van Sweden in his worthwhile pictorial how-to Architecture in the Garden. “If you build a fence, lay a terrace, dig a pool or erect a retaining wall, you create edges.” Edges make inadvertent, dramatic statements. The eye is automatically drawn to the places in a garden where change occurs, the point of transition from one level to another, for example, or the spot where one material is replaced by something different. Read more

Piet Blanckaert-Philippe Perdereau

Use Mass Planting To Create Great Effects

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Simple does not mean stupid. Don’t underestimate the intelligence behind the less complicated look for gardens.

Piet Blanckaert-Philippe Perdereau

 

DESIGN WISE | It’s been two decades since gardening became a fashionable endeavor in North America. If we’ve learned anything during this time, over and above garden history and plant vocabulary, it’s that maintaining a garden is damn hard work. Only those who love mucking about in the dirt survive and thrive in the trenches.

This knowledge, plus a fascination with mid-20th-century modernist architecture and the gardens that went along with them, has lead to the pursuit of simple, (and hopefully) low maintenance planting schemes. Read more

Terracotta Pots - Casey Phaisalakani

Clever Ways To Use Ordinary Flower Pots

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Here’s how to create instant impact in the garden by using the same ordinary element over and over again.

Terracotta Pots - Casey Phaisalakani

 

CHEAP & CHIC | It takes a certain kind of fearlessness to believe that you can make a cliché look fresh. The cliché I’m referring to here is the wide-rimmed dime-a-dozen terracotta pot found in every nursery and hardware store from there to China. You know the (inexpensive) kind I’m talking about, pictured here empty. If you’re like me, you cannot wait to replace yours with their more curvaceous Italian cousins, or some skinny Long Toms from England, or something stunning in Asian stoneware.  Read more

Nepeta, 'Walker's Low'

This Variety Of Nepeta Is A Bulletproof Plant

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A gorgeous, indestructible, low-maintenance, high-performance, cost-effective garden: Is that too much to ask?

Nepeta, 'Walker's Low'

 

MONEY WELL SPENT | There are people who derive tremendous satisfaction from garden chores, but I’m not one of them. I love garden design and history, and enjoyed researching and planning our own garden with my husband, who is a garden designer. I loved choosing the plants and installing them, and I don’t mind occasional watering or weeding. But after that, I want to spend my time doing other things. I need my garden to be bulletproof: a gorgeous, indestructible, low-maintenance, high-performance environment—and of course I expect my investment in plants to be cost-effective. Read more