By Barbara Perry Lawton (This article was first published in The Gateway Gardener May 2006 issue.) Traditional gardeners and garden designers often create each garden bed and border with a single focus, with an emphasis on a particular group of plants. As a result, we often have perennial borders, annual beds, rose gardens, herb gardens and other “Johnny-One-Note” gardens. While
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By Jerry Pence (This article was first published in the November/December 2005 issue of The Gateway Gardener.) When planning the landscape design around your home, consider the outdoor spaces as extensions of the indoors. In the backyard, patios and cooking areas might be extensions of a family room or kitchen. In the front of your home, a nice porch or
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By Jerry Pence (This article was first published in the April 2006 issue of The Gateway Gardener.) Side yards have always been the areas of the yard that are least tended to and usually considered just a way to get between the front and back yards. For these reasons, those areas are generally left alone or maybe planted with a
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By Jerry Pence (This article was first published in the May 2006 issue of The Gateway Gardener.) The front yard is the showpiece to many landscapes. It is the part that faces the public and dresses up the front of your home. Curb appeal is a term often heard when speaking of the front yard space. One key factor to
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By Jerry Pence (This article was first published in the June 2006 issue of The Gateway Gardener.) When designing a landscape, the first step of the process is the gathering of information on the site. The second step is the conceptual stage, which we’ve been covering the last few articles. Figuring out what goes where and what is needed to
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By Jerry Pence (This article was first published in the July 2006 issue of The Gateway Gardener.) In the previous article in this series, I wrote about placing plants in your design according to their function in the landscape. With that done, now it’s time to look more closely at specific plant selections. There are some basic ways to select
» Read moreBy Cindy Gilberg (This article was first published in The Gateway Gardener January/February 2009 issue.) Replacing a percent of high- maintenance lawn with a more sustainable low-maintenance landscape is a growing trend for the future. “The increased requests I get for assistance is proof that people are using more and more native plants each year, not fewer,” says Scott Woodbury,
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