make a bed (with cardboard)

Living and working in northwestern Oregon, garden designer Wesley Younie is no stranger to dealing with challenging environments. When presented with this garden’s elevation changes, drainage management, and extreme climate conditions, he devised a plan that addresses it all—along with a specific functional wish list from the homeowners. Want to know which plants he used? Here are the plant IDs for this beautiful, sustainable landscape.

If you’re anything like us, then you love your dog and want to include them in as many of your daily activities as possible. Every dog owner has experienced the joy, frustration, and laughter caused by our four-legged friends who decide to help us complete a task and, in most cases, create even more chaos as a result.

With the massive industrialisation, intensive agriculture, and expansion of urban areas that has occurred in the UK since the 1950’s, we have lost 96% of the wild meadows which once dotted the landscape.

These are perfect to use in BBQ parties, birthday party or even weddings as a table decoration piece and to light up the party when the sun goes down. It's very easy to do it and will cost almost nothing.

A garden that looks gorgeous with zero effort sounds too good to be true, and it probably is. But it’s certainly possible to create a fabulous, flower-filled garden that’s fuss-free and easy to look after. Eminent garden designer and writer James Alexander-Sinclair has designed gardens across the length and breadth of the UK, and in many other countries besides. Here, he shares some of his trade secrets, for creating gardens that are low-maintenance and lovely, including his favourite fuss-free plants and easy ways to tackle weeds.

Ulex europaeus better known as Gorse, furze, furse or whin is a very prickly shrub of the pea family. Western gorse Ulex gallii is frequent in the western side of Britain and is relatively low growing yet robust. Dwarf gorse or Ulex minor is a low growing, sprawling shrub.

If you are looking for a show stopping display of spring flowers then why not try planting   primary colours of Red, Blue and Yellow in the same bed.

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Prepping a bed without turning or tilling may actually help reduce the number of weed seeds that sprout, so in many situations, it’s my tactic of choice. If a sunny patch of lawn is destined to house a crop of summer tomatoes or a fall-planted bulb garden, or an existing border needs some smothering of weeds. how to make a bed with cardboardTHE EXPLANATION below assumes the underlying soil is fairly decent, neither bog nor wasteland nor highly compacted, and that the vegetation growing in it is mostly herbaceous (like lawn, not a thicket of blackberries or po

Lately I have a lot of little fuzzy black and white creatures eating the leaves of my cannas (above), which is what got me started wondering who’s who. Turns out that’s the larval form of a hickory tussock moth, I think, whose usual diet is ash, elm, oak, hickory, maple, willow, and other trees.Though he looks velvety, look but don’t touch, apparently: The long “lashes” of the hickory tussock moth, Lophocampa caryae, are hollow tubes connected to poison glands, and can give susceptible people a stinging nettle-like rash or other reaction. The rest of the bristles, or setae, may also be irritating.This extensive University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee article offers a full portrait of the life of the hickory tussock moth, which apparently will spend the winter in a silk cocoon under tree bark or on the ground, then eventually works its way gradually n

THINKING OF CREATING SOME NEW BEDS next spring? Or as you’re cleaning up this fall, have you noticed that you need to smother some pesky weeds and turn existing beds back to tame? Don’t wait till winter ends; starting now–in autumn–make (or smother) a bed with cardboard, or newsprint. Here’s how to kill weeds and prep new gardens easily and without chemicals–perhaps where lawn grows now–and without having to till.

You may ask: Now why would I want to go to a talk about a historic and grand National Trust property situated in another climate altogether, a place long on fantastic walls and fountains, connecting outdoor “hallways,” magnificent topiaries, and hedges of box, hornbeam and yew? (As is probably the case in your garden, I have not one of those things here.)On a visit maybe 20 years ago, Hidcote was the initial place I saw such formal lines contrasted against a “jungle style of planting.” Even though each garden area is clearly enclosed and its shape well-defined, as in the famed Red Border up top, the plants in individual beds within each area were invited to just have at it, to spill out into the paths here and there, and to spill into one another in a riot of color, texture and intimate connection that’s both restrained and unrestrained all at once. Delightful.And then, it was this that made me perk up at news of the upcoming lecture:On Garden Conservancy Open Days at my