Bigger Garden

Your window boxes don’t have to check out when summer does. Swap in richly colored flowers, textured foliage, ornamental grasses, and a few gourds, and they’ll become one of the best-looking spots in your fall garden. Autumn hands you a buil...

Sod feels like the fast track to an instant lawn, and in a lot of ways it is. Roll it out, water it in, and within weeks you have a green, established-looking yard instead of months of watching seed germinate unevenly. But that speed only works if the soil underneath is actually ready to receive it. Sod laid over poorly prepared ground struggles to root, develops patchy dead ...

A thriving garden and a pest-free home should go together, but a lot of the choices that make plants happy also make a yard more appealing to ants, rodents, and everything in between. Thick mulch beds, dense plantings against the foundation, and a little extra moisture are exactly what a garden wants and exactly what pests are looking for. The good news is that a few adjustme...

Anemones bring a loose, natural feel to the garden with their delicate petals and slender stems. Depending on the variety, they can bloom from early spring through fall, filling garden beds with shades of white, pink, purple, blue, and red.

While anemones look beautiful planted in groups, the right companion plants can make them stand out even more. I like pairing t...

here is a brief, tragic window in late summer that every gardener knows too well. The early summer stars have faded, seed heads are drying out, and beds start looking tired and patchy long before the foliage officially turns for fall. If you want color that carries from late spring all the way to that first hard frost, the fix isn’t complicated. It’s succession planting.