Simple Ideas for Better Homes, Gardens & Outdoor Spaces
First impressions matter, and your front yard is the very first thing guests and passersby see. Transform your home’s exterior into a welcoming, polished masterpiece with our Frontyard Landscaping & Outdoor Living category. Whether you want to upgrade your entryway walkway, install stunning foundation plantings, or create a charming porch seating nook, we have the plants, hardscape materials, and decor to maximize your curb appeal.
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
A magnolia in a three-gallon nursery pot is easy to misjudge. It stands about three feet tall, carries a handful of glossy leaves, and looks perfectly at home eight feet from the front steps. Fifteen or twenty years later, if it is a full-size Southern magnolia, it can top the roofline of a two-story house, … 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
A pink tree in full bloom usually lasts about one to two weeks. A hard freeze or a few days of heavy rain can cut that to a few days, and a nursery photo never shows that. People buy a tree for the picture and then find that it flowers in a frost pocket, grows … Read more
Most Christmas yard displays go up in a single afternoon and get judged at 5 p.m., when the light fades and whatever is brightest becomes the whole show. The usual result is a yard that looks crowded after dark, bare during the day, and tangled with extension cords in between. A better approach starts with … Read more