The Ultimate Guide to Container-Garden Design

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.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the recent epiphany in gardens and mental health is a new discovery, but gardens have long been linked to good health and quiet reflection. In fact, the late 20th-century rift in our relationship with the natural world can be seen as a historical blip in an otherwise unbroken bond between man and nature. The well-documented surge in interest in the natural world during Covid was in fact a restoration of a healthier relationship that we as a society had been enjoying for centuries.

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.

As inextricable from mass festive wares as tinsel and paper hats, the poinsettia blazes red in most shops and homes during December. Being such an omnipresent sight makes it unappealing for many of us, but, thankfully – if the standard scarlet species makes you wince – there are less common forms available that are well worth buying to brighten the house this Christmas.

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.

In late winter and spring, usually before the leaves appear, catkins hang from the bare branches of trees like alder, hazel and silver birch. The first known use of the word ‘catkin’ is in an English translation of a Flemish botanical guide written in 1554 by physician and botanist Rembert Dodoens. He uses the Dutch word katteken meaning ‘little cat’ which was translated as ‘catkin’. Catkins are also known as ‘aments’, derived from the Latin for ‘strap’ or ‘string’.

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We’re off to New Zealand today to visit Lynne Leslie’s garden. We’ve visited before (Lynne’s Garden in New Zealand), and it is always fun to see what she is growing.

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