Simple Ideas for Better Homes, Gardens & Outdoor Spaces
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
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
A bouquet bought in January has usually been through a lot before it reaches your vase. It has sat in a chilled warehouse, a truck and a store cooler, then crossed a cold parking lot, and now it is going into a room with the heating on and dry air. Flowers that handle that route … Read more