This story category covers garden design and maintenance; it also covers tools and shortcuts that make gardens easier to care for.
EASY & AWESOME | If you’ve been casting around for the perfect mid-winter gift for someone who loves flowers but may not be a gardener, we recommend this beautiful low-maintenance no-brainer: flower bulbs in clear glass containers (so you can appreciate their roots) ready to burst into midwinter bloom. Read more
CREATIVE SOLUTION | Sometimes the most stunningly beautiful solution to a problem is also the most elementary one—like using candlelight rather than electricity to illuminate a snowy walkway.
Design Wise | If you love beautiful gardens and find yourself near Robson and Georgia this evening with an hour so to spare, you might want to walk over to UBC Robson Square where international superstar garden designer Andrea Cochran will give a free lecture at 7 p.m. Read more
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
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
SUPER VALUE | If you want your kids to fall in love with gardening, it’s a good idea to get them digging early. To very young children, popping their first seeds in soil, watching them come up and then harvesting the fruits of their labour is powerful magic.
When I was in Pottery Barn Kids a few weeks ago, I spotted the rectangular galvanized planter shown in the photo above (on the left) and thought finally a decent-size soil receptacle raised to just the right height so little people can easily tend and keep an eye on seeds they’ve sowed (it’s also the perfect size for adults wanting to grow herbs or a small crop of salad vegetables). Read more
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
THE CREATIVE SOLUTION | Cut flowers straight from the garden or the corner store are a fine if conventional way to bring spring indoors. But bedding plants, which are becoming more plentiful everywhere as the gardening season takes hold, make equally attractive, arguably more novel and definitely cost-effective arrangements.
Read more
GROW YOUR OWN | Blueberries thrive in our little corner of the planet—they love our climate and generally acidic soil—so if you want to grow something both good to eat and attractive to look at (what can I say, I’m married to a garden designer), you might want to leave room for a blueberry bush or three in your garden or grow this yummy fruit in tubs on your balcony. Read more
WHAT THE PROS KNOW | Garden ornaments can be expensive for sure, but they don’t need to be. Witness the clever way the late, great British Interior and garden designer Sir David Hicks employed ordinary available-in-every-garden-centre containers to create a particularly eye-catching pot garden on his own estate, The Grove, in Oxfordshire, England. Read more
