Simple Ideas for Better Homes, Gardens & Outdoor Spaces
Most garden pests are hard to catch in the act. Many feed at night, hide on the undersides of leaves, tunnel inside stems, or live in the soil where nobody looks until a plant collapses. By the time an insect is easy to spot, the population is often large. The plant, meanwhile, has been leaving … Read more
A yard planted mostly for summer has a predictable winter problem. The leaves drop, the perennials get cut back or collapse, and what remains is mulch, a fence, and a few bare sticks. Most people respond by looking away from the garden until April. The fix is rarely more flowers. A winter garden depends on … Read more
Most weekend garden projects go wrong in one of two places. Either the materials were never meant to sit outside in rain and sun, or the thing got built before anyone decided where it would live. A planter that dries out in a day, a trellis that leans after the first windy week, a compost … Read more
A she shed that sits alone on bare lawn looks like a garden shed with a nicer paint job. The same building with a path leading to it, plants softening its corners and a place to sit outside the door looks like a destination. The structure matters less than most people expect. What surrounds it … Read more
Purple is a hard colour to judge from a nursery tag. The word can mean a blue-violet salvia, a pinkish-magenta coneflower, or a pansy so dark it reads as black. Those plants behave very differently once they are in the ground. Deep shades vanish in shade and at a distance. Pale lavenders wash out in … Read more
A bulb the size of a softball and a bulb the size of a golf ball can look nearly identical in a garden-center bin, and they will not produce the same flowers. The large one has already stored enough energy for two or three flower stalks, each carrying four to six blooms. The small one … Read more
Most “purple lilies” aren’t purple. Nursery tags and catalog photos use the word loosely, and what arrives in July is often burgundy, plum, wine-red or magenta, with a few lavender-pink exceptions. That is still excellent for a summer border, but it changes what you should buy and where you should plant it. Dark flowers vanish … Read more
A gardenia planted in the back corner of the yard can bloom heavily for weeks and never register with anyone, while a single lavender plant beside the front step perfumes every trip to the mailbox. Scent depends less on how many fragrant plants a garden holds than on where they sit. Fragrance molecules drift a … Read more
A poinsettia on a front step looks wonderful for roughly one cold night. Then the first hard chill arrives, the red bracts droop, and by morning the plant looks scalded. This is the most common way a poinsettia fails as decoration, and it happens because the plant is tropical while the decorating ideas people copy … Read more
The picture on an amaryllis box and the flower that opens six weeks later don’t always match. Most kits are sold by color alone, such as “red” or “white” or “pink”. Within each color there is a wide spread in petal shape, bloom size, stalk height and whether the flower is single or double. Some … Read more