Photos Ideas, Tips & Guides

“April is the Kindest Month. April gets you out of your head and out working in the garden.” ~Marty Rubin~

Today’s photos are from Lee:

If finding gifts for birthdays and holidays like Mother's Day strikes a little fear into your heart, I can empathize. Some parents never want anything or are quick to say that the best gift is you, their child.

Choosing to hire an interior designer is no small decision, and if you haven't ever worked with a professional in this capacity before, it can be difficult to fully determine whether a specific person is the right fit.

Perennials are the heart of so many gardens, coming back year after year to fill our spaces with beautiful flowers and foliage. But because they don’t usually bloom as long as annuals, and change through the seasons, they can sometimes be difficult to use effectively in a garden design—but not for the gardens we visit today in our look back at some of favorite perennial gardens featured on the GPOD.

If you're dealing with an awkwardly shaped room in your home and are coming up short on how to best arrange furniture within the space, professional interior designers are here to help.

We get to see tons of beautiful plants on the GPOD, but almost nothing gets people quite as excited as beautiful displays of roses. So today we’re celebrating some of the most beautiful rose-centric posts we’ve had on the GPOD.

We love a good before-and-after on the GPOD. Getting to see what a gardener started with really shows the work, talent, and time that goes into creating every garden we feature on the GPOD. So today we’re going to share some of our favorite glow-ups.

We’re looking back again today at some of the best GPOD posts from the past, and today the theme is containers! There is so much room to be creative and playful with containers, and they can transform the smallest space—even an apartment balcony—into a beautiful garden.

The HGIC Visit to Riverbanks Botanical Garden in Columbia ~Part 2~ This is a beautiful place to bring the whole family. There’s a 3-acre interactive Children’s Garden that features a dino dig, giant tree houses, splash zones, and more. Plant a visit soon!

If you feel it’s time to refresh your home, but fear the cost and work involved, think again: you don’t need to break the bank or hire a professional to revamp your home or a single room. Nor do you have to go on a shopping spree to completely overhaul your home’s decor.

This week we’re going to do something a little different on the GPOD: We’re going to be looking back over the years of gardens we have shared and pull out some of our favorites to visit again. And today the posts are all going to be stunning shade gardens. Gardening in shade can feel a bit like a challenge or limitation, but lots of GPOD contributors have turned that challenge into an opportunity and made beautiful gardens.

As much as we adore forecasting upcoming trends here at The Spruce, we love seeing those trends executed in real life even more.

I’Y FRIEND JOE LAMP’L (aka Joe Gardener) had watched my recent appearance at Swarthmore College’s Scott Arboretum, where I received their Scott Medal in March, and listened to my “acceptance speech,” if you could call it that. He invited me to join him on his latest podcast episode and reflect on my gardening life so far, as I had at Scott, and our conversation is on his website now.

Joseph in northern Indiana here. Last week I got a chance to visit Wellfield Botanic Gardens in Elkhart, Indiana. It is a beautiful little garden, with lots to see, and this time of year the daffodil display is incredible.

Michael C. LaFerney in Lakeville, Massachusetts, shared a few photos with us.. .

With so many interior paint colors to choose from, it's easy to overlook a few gems. So that you can expand your radar of amazing hues, take a look at these 15 underrated paint color favorites that designers love and wish their clients would request more often.

If you think there’s no such thing as a faux pas in selecting and installing window treatments, think again. Mistakes can range from mismeasuring the window to miscalculating the occupiable space on either side of it. It can also be purely aesthetic in nature, such as using curtain panels that look ridiculously short and choppy for the window they’re dressing.

It is spring in my garden in northern Indiana, and the bulbs are showing off like crazy. Daffodils are everywhere, and tulips are poking up and getting ready to bloom. But sometimes I think the beautiful spring bulbs distract from all the other amazing plants that bloom in spring. So here are some of my other favorite spring-blooming perennials.

Cherry Ong has shared these photos of a container she created for her garden in Richmond, British Columbia, last summer. She used a big container, about 32 inches in diameter, from her favorite source, Pot Inc., and planted it up with all kinds of beautiful plants, with a heavy emphasis on great foliage and flowers playing a supporting role.

The HGIC Staff recently visited the beautiful Riverbanks Botanical Gardens in Columbia. Plan a visit soon! ~Part 1~

We are Roger and Linda. We live in Pompano Beach, Florida. We have built this little paradise, which is our pride and joy. We cherish every moment that we sit and relax daily in our garden.

Dera Burreson

We’re back today with photos that Marilyn Regnier shared with us of her once-in-a-lifetime trip to see the famous Keukenhof spring flower-bulb displays. The park in Lisse, Netherlands, shows off millions of bulbs each spring, with displays that are both over the top and full of ideas you can take home—on a smaller scale—to your own garden.

Bobby Berk, design expert, author, and award-winning TV host famous for his work on Netflix's hit show «Queer Eye» and Tri Pointe Homes, a leading US homebuilder that prioritizes customer experience, innovative design, and eco-friendly practices have come together for an exclusive collaboration that allows consumers to buy their very own Bobby Berk Designed Home.

Today Marilyn Regnier is taking us along on a trip of a lifetime, to see the biggest spring bulb display in the world.

In Strategies for Optimizing a Small Garden Space, Susan Morrison writes, “When I began designing gardens more than 20 years ago, I was surprised to find that smaller spaces were often more challenging to plan than larger ones. In those early years, clients with tiny lots would come to me with extensive lists of their must-have items, and I would struggle to fit everything in. It was a huge breakthrough when I finally realized that identifying the specific features and details to include in a garden should be the final step in the process, not the first.

It’s Joseph from northern Indiana again here today.

It’s Joseph in Northern Indiana here today. As spring arrives, so many of our gardens are full of daffodils and tulips and other examples of spring-blooming species from around the world that I thought I’d take a moment to celebrate the spring bloomers that are native to my part of the world. The woodlands of the eastern half of North America are full of native spring-blooming wildflowers that just don’t get as much appreciation in gardens as some of the European species we’re all so familiar with.

The Clemson Extension Horticulture Team recently visited the Greenwood City Greenhouse to see a behind the scenes tour of the Festival of Flowers topiaries. Plan a visit to Greenwood, SC to see these amazing topiaries that will displayed  around downtown Greenwood. The Festival of Flowers Celebration is June 6th through the 9th. The topiaries will be on display the entire month of June.

We've been independently researching and testing products for over 120 years. If you buy through our links, we may earn a commission. Learn more about our review process.

Today we’re in Phoenix, Maryland, visiting Sally Barker’s beautiful garden:

We’re back for more of Cherry Ong’s visit to a great garden today, one that she saw on a tour organized by the Vancouver Hardy Plant Society last summer. This is a collector’s shade garden, full of lots of beautiful and unusual plants, including a stunning collection of Podophyllum (mayapples; hardiness varies, but mostly Zones 6–9).

If you have a pile of cardboard boxes sitting around your home and aren't quite sure what to do with them, consider reusing them to create home decor accents or a playhouse for your kids or pets. With a sturdy structure thanks to an inner layer of fluted material, a cardboard box can often be useful a second or even a third time.

We’re visiting another garden with Cherry Ong today, one that she saw on a tour organized by the Vancouver Hardy Plant Society last summer. This is a collector’s shade garden, full of lots of beautiful and unusual plants, including a stunning collection of Podophyllum (mayapples; hardiness varies, but mostly Zones 6–9).

We’re off to East Tennessee today to visit with Elin Johnson: