Garden, Landscaping

Brick red-dyed mulch is the equivalent of the 1970s orange shag carpet. It was popular for about two minutes and then became the ultimate downer after the fad passed.

Unfortunately, colored wood chips are still around - even advertised on TV - which makes no sense when natural-looking alternatives are available.

Mulch is a term applied to anything you spread out on top of the ground from straw to wood chips.

While these mulches ...

We like to see color and life everywhere in the garden, which often leads us to plant in the area beneath our trees.

If you choose and plant carefully, a tree and a garden can happily co-exist. After all, most trees grow among other plants in nature. But it's also easy to do harm to a tree by planting in its root zone, and if you choose the wrong plants, they will have a hard time surviving.

The worst thing you can do is plant annuals ...

Just as every house has a personality - whether it's a ranch, bungalow, Queen Anne, Tudor, Cape Cod or any other architectural style - the landscape that surrounds it has a personality, too, especially out front.

There are formal gardens - neatly trimmed and fertilized lawns, tightly manicured evergreens and plenty of straight lines. There are cottage gardens with billowy, informal plantings of annuals, perennials, flowering vines and roses.
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So much of what we trash can find a second home in the garden. Going green in the garden is not only about planting trees and flowers for Earth Day, but it's also about using natural and organic products. It's finding natural ways to solve traditional garden issues such as pests or disease. It's also a way to make a beautiful and safe garden to enjoy.

Tree stumps, twigs and branches are just a few of the natural items that you can reuse to make your ...

As snow flies in the Sierra Nevada, the Rocky Mountains and the Adirondacks, nature is pruning her evergreens. It uses the weight of snow upon small seedling pines and firs to distort their otherwise upright symmetrical growth. Gale forces can distort others so the windward side loses its branches and foliage. It is these same forces that shape the evergreens of China and Japan, where such natural forms gave birth to a tradition that celebrates nature's artwork: ...

This is typically the time of the year I might tout hollies, conifers or even poinsettias, but as I was walking around a dark and dreary, rainy garden today it was a cluster of Color Guard yuccas that stood like beacons of welcoming color. If you are not familiar with Color Guard it is the best selection of the native Yucca filamentosa.

You may be thinking yucca and native doesn't pair up for your location, and you might be right; on the other hand, ...