How to choose boulders for any garden

Choosing and placing boulders for your landscape job is an art.  The Japanese have several years of study on just rock placement.  But you can do a great job with just some sensitivity and a good eye.  Here are the basic tips. I usually suggest choosing local or fairly local boulders.  This keeps your costs [...]

More great, reliable plants for California landscapes

Here are a few more of my favorite plants, easy, reliable, and striking, and different than the usuals out there. Tree Dahlias grow 10′ tall in one season and bloom late in the fall.  Sometimes an October storm will knock off the blossoms.  But you don’t have to grow this Dahlia for the flowers.  The [...]

A few great (and reliable) plants for California landscapes

I’m done with my California winter installations and hoping for some spring Wyoming weather.  But right now it’s the last vestiges of planting time in California before the summer heat so get going and order up some of these fantastic plants.  These are a few of the reliable, unusual, and color interesting plants I love [...]

A Sense of Place or A Sensibility of Place

In my work I can always tell where a person is from. No, not from their accent but from what kind of landscape they desire.  Usually, this is a memory deep in their subconscious from their childhood–their initial Sense of Place. Most city people will tell you they have no idea what a ‘Sense of [...]

More Patio Notes

I recently visited some old clients and got a chance to see how their gardens had filled in.  I want to comment on just two gardens with interesting patios. The first was an idea I cooked up.  It involved using pavers set in concrete around the edges of the patio.  Executing it was a contractors’ [...]

Edible Low Water Landscapes

The no-brainer of edible landscapes are fruit trees and vegetable boxes.  But there is more, much more, especially for gardeners in temperate climates.  Those are the climates I know and here are some great landscape plants that have edible parts, usually fruits, for your garden design process. One of my most all-time favorites is Ugni [...]

Patios hard and soft

I received a question from someone on using concrete pads underneath a DG patio, instead of prepping the subsurface with baserock material.  That got me thinking about doing a post on patios in general and what, from a designer and installers perspective I know and understand. First a few words in general regarding different types [...]

Pollinators in trouble. What a city dweller can do.

I was disturbed to see yet more articles in the NY Times about bees and colony collapse.  I was a home beekeeper in CA since the mid-90′s.  When I moved to Wyoming, I gave that up in favor of not having lots of grizzlies in my yard. Being a horticulturist and amateur botanist, I was [...]

Entrance gardens Part 3–The Finished Product

The small entrance garden is now finished.  (See Posts 1 and 2)   I moved around several existing plants.  I used the existing Mondo grass as fillers and bought 20 more one gallon plants, which we divided to fill even more space.  The garden look good even though it was just installed.  Within a few [...]

California natives Part 3 Groundcovers…Manzanitas and Ceanothus

In this small series of posts on California natives for the garden, remember I’m trying to keep it simple and successful for the home gardener.  Most of the time when a homeowner asks for a low or no-water garden and I give them what they want, they always over water regardless.  Therefore, in general, unless [...]