I CAN’T IMAGINE LIFE life without my admittedly oddball collection of houseplants, many of which have been with me for several decades already. So I was delighted recently to meet Rob Moffitt, whose Los Angeles-based botanical design studio (above) specializes in matching their clients with houseplants that are just the way I like them: Not just pretty, but possessing loads o...

WHEN I BOUGHT my place decades ago, it was nestled in a tiny piece of former farmland with a little 1880s house and no garden. There were, however, five giant apple trees, at least a century old even then – all overgrown, but still willing to bear fruit despite their age and years of neglect. I’m very attached to them, even though I still don’t know their names, which was why...

ONCE UPON A TIME, the seed catalogs came out around the start of the New Year, but these days the very first ones may arrive by Thanksgiving, and their listings may be posted online even earlier. So I guess what I am saying is: It’s not too early to start talking about seed shopping … and it’s never too early to start scouting out new seed sources that you might not know abou...

TIME FOR A LESSON in winter sowing—sowing seeds in fall and early winter outside in a protected spot, a sort of easy DIY home nursery for making more plants. What we’ll learn to propagate that way in this reprise edition from the A Way to Garden podcast archive are specifically seeds of native plants, both meadow perennials like asters and Joe-Pye weed, and also various shrub...

BESIDES THEIR native-heavier plant palette and looser style, ecologically designed landscapes have another difference: The way we maintain them is not the same as with more traditional, ornamentally-focused gardens. I’m asked again and again by gardeners who have planted a meadow-like area or some other habitat-inspired, naturalistic feature about how to handle its after...