Simple Ideas for Better Homes, Gardens & Outdoor Spaces
Create a seamless flow between nature and comfort by turning your yard into a breathtaking, multi-functional paradise. Welcome to our Backyard Landscaping & Outdoor Living category, your ultimate destination for everything from hardscape materials and lush plants to weather-resistant furniture and ambient lighting. Whether you are building custom stone patios, planting vibrant garden beds, or setting up an inviting open-air dining space, we have the tools, supplies, and inspiration you need to design your dream backyard.
Bark mulch breaks down and needs topping up every year or two. Sod costs a few dollars per square foot before anyone has dug a bed or hauled a wheelbarrow. Stone, gravel and a handful of tough plants work differently. You pay once, and the result looks better each season as the plants fill in. … Read more
The most common way a small cactus garden dies has very little to do with sun or neglect. It is the bowl. A pretty ceramic dish with no hole in the bottom, a layer of soil, a few spiny plants, and a watering can that seemed reasonable at the time: that combination quietly drowns more … Read more
The bare, root-ridged ground under a mature oak looks like a problem that topsoil can solve. Haul in a few yards of loam, build a bed, plant it up. Plenty of well-meant projects start this way, and a good number end with a thinning canopy a few years later. The damage happens below the surface. … Read more
Most backyard garden plans fail before a single plant goes in. The usual cause is a rectangle of lawn with a few beds scattered along the fence, drawn without any thought for where the sun falls, where people walk, or where the water goes. The result is a yard that looks fine in a photo … Read more
Most lawns are designed by default. The builder rolls out sod to the property lines, the mower follows the outline, and years later the yard is a green rectangle with a tree dropped in and a patch by the fence where grass never took. Landscaping a lawn rarely means adding more. It usually means deciding … Read more
A front yard rarely fails in winter because of one bad plant. It fails because everything was doing the same job. Perennials supplied the color, deciduous shrubs supplied the bulk, and the lawn supplied the green. When frost takes all three, what’s left is bare soil, brown stalks, and a house that suddenly looks exposed. … Read more
Most cactus gardens fail for a simple reason: the plants were fine, but the soil was not. A cactus bought at a garden center and planted in ordinary garden loam, then watered on the same schedule as the petunias next to it, will usually rot from the roots up. The plant is rarely the problem. … Read more
Most backyard apple trees get planted the same way: a hole in the middle of the lawn, a stake, and a ring of mulch that grows lopsided over the years. The tree may fruit, but it ends up looking like an afterthought. Meanwhile, it can be one of the most useful design elements in a … 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
You’ve got a postage-stamp backyard, three kids who are somehow always “bored,” and a Pinterest board full of play areas that need at least a quarter acre to pull off. Sound familiar? I get it. My own backyard is barely bigger than a two-car garage, and for years I thought that meant my kids were … Read more