2-for-1 Gardens - Festive events

We’re back in Calabasas, California, today, looking at the garden Kathy Sandel created. She is a retired landscape designer, and this is the garden she created for herself at the home where she lived for more than 20 years. She moved away from this garden a few years ago, so these photos are a chance to look back and remember a beautiful and much-loved garden space.

The biggest epiphany of my horticultural career was learning about plant survival strategies. Like most gardeners, I was accustomed to classifying plants as annuals, biennials, or perennials. But dividing them into groups based on their survival strategies instead got me thinking about how they evolved to grow, which in turn helped me to cultivate them more successfully in my garden in Texas.

Today we’re off to California to visit with Kathy Sandel.

‘Marian Sampson’ hummingbird coyote mint

Blue moths are not just a mesmerizing sight in your backyard but a symbol of a thriving ecosystem.

Small Space Garden Design Ideas from the Pros Learn how to make the most out of small garden spaces from 4 designers. Elevating Small Space Gardens

Mushrooms in the garden can be an unsettling sight, indicating changes in the soil and in growing conditions generally. While growing mushrooms is becoming more popular as a home interest, fungi can be unpleasant in gardens when they arrive out of nowhere. These unplanned garden guests can also be toxic, so you’ll want to remove them if you have curious children or pets.

Creating a garden is, initially, an introverted process. It takes a while to imagine a garden and to develop it into its final form. For much of that period your thoughts are just part of an evolving dream of a future reality. It takes longer to build a garden and a whole lifetime, or more, for that garden to mature. To embark on making a garden is an act of faith. The creative journey is made unique by the relationships we have with those we enlist to help us. Without other people there would be no garden. Together, we generate a great alchemical soup of ideas, we consider constraints and we discuss details that ultimately coalesce into the new garden. Landscape gardens can express themselves in myriad ways. I have always enjoyed the freedom landscaping offers to explore what the land, the people and the circumstances ultimately reveal.

Clare Foster's own front garden in Berkshire, with loose planting anchored around clipped spheres of silvery Teucrium fruticans

We’re in Beeton, Ontario, today, visiting Marina. We’ve been to her beautiful garden before (Marina’s Garden in Beeton, Ontario) when it was just a few years old, and we’re back today to see how it has thrived and grown since then.

Visit the Hampton-Preston House and Garden in Historic Columbia. It was built for Anisley and Sarah Hall in 1818. They lived here until 1823, when the house was sold to Wade Hampton Sr and his wife, Mary Couter Hampton.

Last week, I told you about a garden talk I attended at the Robert Mills Carriage House and Gardens in Columbia, SC. Jim Martin (The Magnolia Plantation and Gardens Director of Horticulture & Landscape) was the second presenter. He discussed using bulbs to create “special little moments” every day.