Great Design Plant: Red Yucca Spikes Dry Spots With Color

What if you could get the ability to tolerate freezing temperatures and blazing heat in a single plant? Add a few other characteristics, such as beautiful flowers, drought tolerance and low maintenance, and you

Gardening With Kids: How to Plant Bulbs

Living in Michigan as I do means enduring long, harsh winters without much sun and almost no color. Every year the appearance of flowering bulbs, like crocuses, tulips, daffodils and hyacinths, represents the ho

5 Great Plants for Borders and Screens

I love deciduous shrubs (please dont call them bushes). I enjoy their ease of maintenance and architectural forms — and many, like Viburnum and chokeberry and ninebark, flower, have ornamental fruit, feed wildli

Great Design Plant: Eastern Bluestar Wows in Fall

With knockout foliage and an open, loose form, eastern bluestar (Amsonia tabernaemontana) pretty much fits with any garden style — and right about now, its putting on quite a show.Delicate, elongated leaves turn

Great Garden Combo: Fall Foliage With a Contemporary Twist

The typical fall garden is a fiery kaleidoscope of color and texture, of trees and shrubs layered to create a vibrant tapestry. As beautiful as that is, it is not the only way to create a memorable autumnal disp

How to Plant a New Lawn From Sod

Looking to start a new lawn fast? Whether youve recently finished building a house and need a lawn to go with it, or simply want to establish a fresh lawn in your current home, starting a lawn from sod is a fair

How to Plant a New Lawn From Seed

If youre looking to start a new lawn or fill in a patchy area of your existing one, consider planting your lawn from seed. While not the perfect solution for every lawn in all parts of the country, grass seed is

Great Design Plant: Cascalote Tree for Sunny Southwestern Style

While it is fun to pronounce the name of this small to medium-size tree (cas-cah-LOH-tay), the real attraction lies in its yellow flowers and unique foliage. Beginning in the fall and continuing into winter, th

A Garden With a Love Story

Some gardens have a story to tell, and some are so highly personal that they are extensions of those who create them. Other gardens seem to work in concert with Mother Nature, where the human hand takes a back s

10 Solutions for Soggy Soil

If your poorly drained garden has kept you from growing your favorite vegetables and flowers this year, don’t give up on gardening just yet. While it is true that your choices are limited by a garden with “wet f

How I Learned to Be an Imperfect Gardener

I remember the day clearly when gardening changed for me. It was the second year living with my new landscape — the first large garden I had ever created from scratch. I was making the rounds along the path, adm

Great Design Plant: Ocotillo for High-Reaching Flair

The deserts of the American Southwest are famous for the many different types of plants that flourish in the hot and dry conditions. Perhaps the most iconic plant found in all three Southwestern deserts is the

5 Unsung Wildflowers That Thrive in Dry Shade

I know there are areas of our gardens that just, well, tick us off and create literal nightmares. (I once dreamed that the entire neighborhood came over to suggest that one small problem spot meant I was a terri

Great Design Plant: Louie Eastern White Pine

Seattle is renowned for its gray skies and seemingly endless rain, so those of us who live here seek out plants that add a Midas touch, especially to the winter garden. Trees, shrubs and perennials that offer br

Organic Matters: Thwart Insect Pests With Trap Crops

Gardeners are a generous bunch, always sharing seeds, plants and especially the produce they’ve grown themselves. But that generosity ends when it comes to pest insects. Few things are as maddening to a gardener

Great Design Plant: Strawberries for All Seasons

I want my entry garden to be both beautiful and functional, so I’ve designed it with a mix of plants that offer multiple seasons of interest along with culinary benefits — and the path leads right up to my kitch

10 Native Wildflowers to Beautify Your Winter Garden

Hopefully you leave up your fall and winter garden, because the benefits are enormous: seeds and cover for wildlife, litter for overwintering butterflies and stems to gather snow, which insulates and hydrates ro

Inspiring Winter Scenes From the Denver Botanic Gardens

I had the opportunity to visit the Denver Botanic Gardens last January on a day that was so cold, I thought I had flown to Alaska by mistake. I had pretty low expectations — what could I possibly expect to see a

Great Design Plant: Wild Hyacinth for a Bolt of Blue

Chances are, you and most of your friends haven’t experimented yet with growing wild hyacinth (also commonly called camas lily). It isn’t widely grown, but it deserves to be. Gorgeous blue spikes appear on tall

Garden for Wildlife to Reap Rich Rewards

I believe that we are our best selves when we give something up. Sometimes that’s being willing to stop arguing with your spouse about where the whisk belongs, and sometimes that’s donating your time or money or