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Garden Design


Every garden needs a good design to make it look its best and function well as an outdoor living space. These articles describe techniques for creating your best garden layout, as well as recommendations for plants that work well together, or companion plantings.
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Most Recent Articles
A successful butterfly garden must support butterflies at all stages of their lives. Learn what plants will attract butterflies to make your garden their home.
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If you have a group of rocks as a landscape feature in your yard, you can show it off with appropriate plantings. Here are some ideas for what to plant, plus tips for planting near the rocks.
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Light changes according to the time of day;  make use of this phenomenon to make your garden more beautiful.
Read how to place color according to light »

If complacency is the enemy of great gardening, then Alaskans are fortunate to the extreme. Every few years, we lose big chunks of our gardens to winters that are unusually terrible, and we get to start all over again, or very nearly so. However, when many hundreds of favorite plants were killed in a recent snowless winter, I was tempted to give up gardening in the subarctic...Even before I could see the full extent of the damage, a saving thought struck me: I would have to view the massive winter kill as an opportunity rather than a problem. That’s right—the garden wasn’t two-thirds dead, it was one-third full...
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Southern garden writer Elizabeth Lawrence wrote: “All gardeners become rock gardeners if they garden long enough.” Gardening is an art, she explained, and rock gardening is the purest, most personal of all forms of horticulture...
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Like many gardeners, I spent several years caught up in the overstuffed container craze. I simplified, and re-discovered that certain tropical plants—by virtue of their strength or flamboyance or natural charm—make dynamic focal points that deserve the spotlight, supported by a few beautiful, secondary companions...
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When garden designer Suzanna Porter is working on a design in her Berkeley, California, office, she doesn't have to travel far for ideas and inspiration. A simple 90-degree turn from her drawing table reveals her own garden...
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A beautiful garden is a collaborative effort between its maker and its plants, neither more important than the other. The gardener envisions the garden, but the plants realize it. And in so doing they frequently create effects the gardener never anticipated...
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We've all heard the expression "you can't see the forest for the trees." Though it refers to one's perspective on life, it does apply to the horticultural arts as well. . . .
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It's easy to spot the low-maintenance roses of yesterday. They're the ones that are still here, planted by some long-gone gardener, growing and blooming even as new families—and interest in gardening—come and go. . . .
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