Native vs. Exotic Native Plants are defined as any plants that occurred in North America before European settlement. Exotic Plants, or non-natives, are those not originally located in North America and your specific region. Plants that are native to where you live have evolved and adapted to your local conditions. Once established, they require very little attention, very little watering, and they're resistant [...]
Can-Can Orange Calibrachoa Looking to add some fantastic color to your garden spaces, but also want something new? Add an eye-catching splash of orange to your beds, borders, and containers with Can-Can Orange calibrachoa. Offering lots of bold tangerine flowers marked with dark red-orange veins, this flower can take full sun, but the trade is it [...]
Green Living Tips - Rain Barrels! Landscape Architects have been on the cutting edge of combining sustainable and green trends with land use planning for decades. Now there are numerous affordable green garden steps you can take in your own garden spaces that will greatly impact our environment. Today our Green Living tip falls into the Water Conservation category; recycle water by [...]
New Colors Can Transform your Garden An exciting and inexpensive way to bring the "pop" back into your garden spaces is to add new colors to your existing color pallette for a nice dramatic change. Each winter we look forward to new and interesting color ideas for the upcoming year. There have been new Petunia colors over the past [...]
Environment and Energy Saving Tips -- Plant Trees A thoughtful way to live a greener life is to make your landscape eco-friendly and plant trees. The addition of a tree in your land- scape is an immediate green step you can take as trees absorb CO2 and other dangerous gasses while they replenish the atmosphere with oxygen. Canopy trees, and Deciduous trees that grow tall and [...]
A Sophisticated Lady As we approach April, you should already be thinking about your summer flowers, and beautiful Phlox 'Miss Lingard' is a mid-summer GardenWise favorite! With a spectacular clump-forming habit, 'Miss Lingard' has spikes of sweetly scented, refined pure white flowers that are disease resistant, so you won't have to deal with that powdery mildew mess you sometimes get with other types of Phlox. Phlox [...]
Bone Structure is Key to a Garden's Success Home owners are often taken aback when they realize, after many hours of prep time and intensive labor, their lovely and very expensive collection of plants in the garden are nothing more than too many lovely and expensive plants in a forgettable outdoor space. The most memorable and eye-catching gardens are those with strong internal hardscape structure. Too many plants [...]
Replacing Lawns with Groundcovers is GardenWise A thoughtful understanding that an outside space can have a positive impact the environment is the best first step to a green garden. Another important step to take is to reduce your lawn area by at least half. To the left is a GardenWIse garden using only groundcovers, no grass! Substitute lawn [...]
Sunday is National Gardening Exercise Day, and many who have a passion for maintaining our gardens know that working with plants is good for us both physically and mentally. Gardening is a moderate, and sometimes strenuous form of exercise that incorporates many important elements of exercise regimes, such as stretching, repetition of movement, and even resistance principles similar to weight training, while expending [...]
I'm a big fan of saving old and chereished trees at all costs. I'm also big on incorporating older trees into a landscape design. Attached is a link to an "ASK MARTHA" column by Martha Stewart in which she writes about her love affair with trees -- Something I can relate to. She discusses picking [...]
