The #1 Project Homeowners Want to Tackle This Year

Everyone has their own design aesthetic, and that’s welcomed. If everyone liked the same things, the world would definitely be a lot more boring. But sometimes a design aesthetic doesn’t quite match its surroundings, like what the previous owners did to this 1958 Eichler E-111 home in the San Mateo Highlands.

Want to grow perennials that have a long blooming period in your garden? Long-lasting perennials add color, height, and texture to the landscape. And equally important, many perennials provide important food sources for beneficial insects and pollinators, such as bees, butterflies, and birds. Perennials can take some time to get established in the garden and the first year, they're typically focused on growing roots. They grow faster in the second and third year and you can enjoy them each year.

Raised garden beds are an excellent choice for gardeners looking to enhance their growing space. The best raised garden beds offer benefits, such as improved soil conditions, better pest control, and easier maintenance. Our expertise at Savvy Gardening stems from years of hands-on gardening in raised beds and thorough research, ensuring that our recommendations are practical and reliable. We’ve narrowed our favorites to a list of six. We meticulously evaluated various factors, including durability, material quality,

This year Chelsea Flower Show was full of interesting trees and shrubs with lots of dreamy woodland-edge planting in dappled light underneath leafy canopies. Native trees such as hawthorns, hazels and silver birch were the favoured choices in many of the show gardens, with a mixture of native and non-native ornamental plants selected for resilience and sustainability. In Ula Maria’s Forest Bathing Garden, white foxgloves, cow parsley and other umbellifers like Baltic parsley (Cenolophium denudatum) and valerian (Valeriana officinalis) were mixed with the simple shade-loving grass Melica altissima ‘Alba’ while Tom Stuart-Smith showcased intricate tapestries of interesting foliage in different shapes and textures. In other gardens, orange was a popular colour in many shades, from deep rusty orange irises to pale orange geums, especially in Ann Marie-Powell’s exuberant Octavia Hill Garden. As always, the Grand Pavilion is the ideal place to discover new and interesting plants showcased by some of the country’s leading nurseries.

Blueland

Jasmit Singh Rangr, a Berkeley-based architect, founder of Rangr Studio, and a lecturer in architecture at the UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design, is technically responsible for building his family’s stylish, minimal, cost-conscious home near the Grizzly Peak summit in the Berkeley Hills. But the behind-the-scenes mastermind who made it possible is his wife, Abigail Dillen, president of Earthjustice, a nonprofit, public interest environmental law firm. Anyone familiar with the area’s cutthroat real estate market won’t be surprised to hear that the search for a vacant, buildable lot in one of the most coveted neighborhoods in the West required Dillen to use all of the skills that make her a great lawyer: creativity, a knack for analysis and research, perseverance, and the art of persuasion.

It takes a certain kind of person to buy a vintage house sight-unseen, to dive headfirst into the rough waters of reviving a property’s faded glory without even opening the front door.

IKEA

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There’s a new product that seemingly everyone has been turning to lately: microcement. In the season of the home remodel, it’s no surprise that homeowners are looking for new ways to upgrade their style this summer. It’s the perfect time for outdoor or indoor projects, and microcement can cover both.

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