When you garden with a matrix-style design, different plants can play different roles in the landscape. Learn more here.

These tips for creating plant combinations that work will take the guesswork out of landscaping a beautiful garden for your yard.

Considered "the most influential garden designer of the past 25 years," Dutch plantsman Piet Oudolf has done for perennial gardening what artist Leonard Ko

Ornamental grasses are one of the most useful types of plants you can use in your landscape designs; here are five ideas to get you started, plus lots of beautiful grasses to achieve your favorite look.

This list of salt resistant plants have the best chance of success in a garden area that is regularly exposted to road deicers or sea air.

Travelling across Australia interviewing influential Australian garden people, I concluded that designing gardens specifically for local conditions & local architecture was now entrenched thinking.

If you want to grow hollyhocks in your garden and reduce the risk of rust, use these tips. Rust (a fungal disease) can be a big problem with hollyhocks and, while there is no solution, there are things we can do to slow it down.

4 simple ways to arrange flowers and plants in your garden to get that beautiful layered look that you want... even if you're a beginner!

Here you'll collect tons of landscape improvement ideas you can use to upgrade and improve your small backyard. It features relevant links you can follow and bookmark.

If you have an edible landscape on your property, then you can live off the land. Here are 40 great plants for edible landscaping.

Our garden expert explains how to design with complementary colors.

The site: A medieval nobleman's summer retreat, a palace in ruins, in the Piedmontese hills of northern Italy. The challenge: Create a modern garden to com

Native plant expert Digby Growns shares his favourite trees to plant in your own garden.

By Jennifer Poindexter I love overlooking garden spaces that have full trees and thick ground cover growing beneath them. If you’d like to create this look for your yard or garden area, try growing pachysandra as a ground cover. This plant is a perennial evergreen which grows in a thick carpet due to its root […]

Best Plants for Wet Soil - The wrong plants will most often succumb to root rot. Luckily, there are many shrubs, trees, and plants that like wet soil.

Pruning lilacs should be on your spring gardening to-do list. Learn when to prune, how to properly prune a lilac bush, and what to do about the suckers!

These shade loving shrubs will fill in the space under trees with beautiful flowers and interesting foliage to beautify those shady areas.

Create a beautiful landscape and conserve water with xeriscaping, a landscaping method that reduces irrigation needs and maximizes the use of natural precipitation.

Beautifying your landscape doesn't have to be difficult! These annuals and perrenials are easy plants to grow, for green thumbs and new gardeners alike.

Shade loving plants are adapted to very little sunlight because of their place in the forest understory. Since the canopies of larger trees and shrubs block as much as 95% of the sunlight that reaches

Get expert advice for planting and growing lavender, from prepping soil to pruning. Plus, learn about the different types—like English, French and Spanish lavender—and how to harvest and use lavender flowers.

These tips for creating plant combinations that work will take the guesswork out of landscaping a beautiful garden for your yard.

I am excited to share that The National Garden Bureau has chosen the allium as the bulb of the year! They pick one annual, one perennial, one bulb crop and one…

Gladioli are beautiful plants and a favorite of many gardeners. Due to their height, many people often wonder if it?s possible to have a gladiolus container garden. This article will help with that.

Three months ago I started a seemingly innocuous project. "How hard can it be to make a flowerbed?", I said. Well I learned along the way and so I am now going to share what I learned and the steps to make your project easier. The major milestones are: Design the Area Excavate the Area Construct a Border Refill with Good Soil Plant the Flowers Cover with Mulch Required Tools Work Shoes - At several points it stormed and flooded my half-dug bed. After working for just 15 minutes I would have 2 inches of mud on the bottom. Be prepared to throw away your shoes or be stuck with permanent junk shoes. Work Gloves - This pair is actually the 2nd that I used. The first pair is in the trash. I wore through all 10 fingers on the first set. Large Spade - This is the best way to get soil up. I tried a shovel and had no luck. This worked especially well with the black clay that we have. Whatever This Is - Yup, I have no idea what to call it, but it is the best tool for clearing out defined areas. I used it dig out the outline for the bed before I started. Spreader - I used this to spread out the new soil evenly throughout the bed. Small Spade - Most people have this already. You dig holes for the bulbs and flowers with it. Heavy Duty Cart - Now I did not have this wonderful contraption for most of the project. For the first 40 or so bags, I just manually carried them to their locations. This will save your back when hauling a lot of soil. Now you may ask why I am going to all this trouble. Well that is because I have lots of Black Texas Clay underneath my yard. It has the nickname of "Black Gumbo". It soaks up water and swells. This is one of the reasons that so many people have foundation problems in our area of North Texas. Most plants need "Well Drained Soil" which is pretty much the opposite of what I have. So I replaced it. I ended up digging up only about 1 - 1.5 feet down. Others have done more, but I frankly got tired of digging. Here is what I replaced it with: Peat Moss - 10 Bags Top Soil - 20 Bags Manure - 10 Bags of the cheap stuff. They have premium manure... but I can't imagine what that means. Compost - 10 Bags Top Soil - 20 Bags Mulch - 12 Bags So let's take a look at those milestones again. Design the Area - This is probably the most important step. This allows you to put in a lot of effort without having to redo things. My wife gave in to my pleadings and helped measure the back yard space beforehand. The map came out like this: I went online and printed off a grid and then with help of a ruler hand drew the dimensions. Next, we did an initial master plan, or how we want it to look in the end. Our friends, Karson and Sharon, helped in this process. This keeps each sub-project from being vastly different and looking odd in the end. Next, we prioritized the sub-projects and focused on our first bed, outside of our bedroom. We found a plan in a landscaping book tailored to our area and used it as our base: This plan came from Creative Homeowner's Texas Home Landscaping book. I would highly recommend it. We then took our master plan for the backyard and fit the plants that we wanted into it. The end result looks like this: Sp now that you have a good plan, digging in the right spot and building a border is not a game of chance. Excavate the Area - This where all the oomph comes into play. At least 50% of my time on this project was spent digging. I am estimating that I dug out about 3,000 lbs of dirt. So be prepared for this phase to go slower than you thought. The first thing to do is to dig out the border a little bit. This allows you to be reckless inside that border with your spade. I used our hose and snaked it around into the shape that I wanted the bed to be. I then used the yet-to-be-named tool from above to strip the grass along the hose. I then removed the hose and dug a little trench and shaped the border a bit. The rest is just good ole-fashioned hard labor. One thing that I did not consider before starting this phase was where on earth all of this dug up dirt was going to go. Luckily, the lot next door to me is empty right now.Now lifting all of that dirt over the fence was no fun, but at least it is out of my yard. Construct a Border - I used two different kinds of border. We have leftover brick from the house construction and so I turned that into a decorative border: I had enough brick to go vertical and it looks good from the grass side. You can also see that famous black clay with the brick there. The fence did not need anything fancy, so I bought the cheap pliable plastic border from Lowes:Before going to the next step of refilling the area, it is a good idea to consider drainage and watering levels. I have a downspout that was pouring right into the middle of the new bed and would erode my hard work. I got a very cheap solid black tube and extended the drain out of the flower bed:I also had four different sprinkler heads that were designed for a lawn and not a flower bed. I found replacement heads that are gentler and used a simple female-female connector to attach them to the main line: Refill with Good Soil - Now is when all of those bags of 'the good stuff' comes into play. I put the good stuff in quotes because frankly anything was better than my black clay. So when I see a $20 miracle bag and a $1.85 pretty good bag, I choose the cheaper. With the number of bags that I bought, this added up to a lot of savings. I layered Peat Moss, Top Soil, Manure, Compost, and Top Soil. I had a friend recommend a combination similar to this and so far I like it. I used my spreader to evenly mix the dirt around the entire bed. Make sure at this point re-check your drainage. Make sure that it slopes away from the house for instance.In the end, my nasty soil was transformed into this: Plant the Flowers - This is the part that you actually planned for. This is the easiest stage. We planted a bunch of bulbs and using our nifty plan, I knew exactly where to go. This stage is fairly anti-climactic. Cover with Mulch - Protect your plant from moisture, bugs, and weeds with a good mulch. This last step also adds a colorful layer to the top Hopefully this guide can help you. Feel free to post and questions or suggestions. I will be following up in the Spring and beyond with how the plants grow in and look.

Create a flower color wheel for your garden as you explore your plant color palette. It's the perfect meeting of gardening and decor! We'll help you discover how to use complementary, analogous, cool, warm colors, and more!

Recently when I judged The 68th Chronicle Garden Competition, preceding Toowoomba’s Carnival of Flowers, I chose ‘Terrara’, a garden growing mainly Australian native plants as Gra…

Bring a touch of the Mediterranean to your living space.

Even late in the season, beauty is possible in clay soils. Discover tough plants that are clay busters and how to improve the soil.

Learn how to make plant selections for your yard that will look beautiful and be easy to maintain with these tips to choose plants for landscaping your garden

There are so many lovely perennials available, so don't bother with these 14 Plants Not To Grow In Your Garden, or other invasive or aggressive plants.

These gorgeous winter plants and flowers are perfect if you have harsh cold weather late in the year. Stand out from the neighbors this year!

Learn which Hosta companion plants will look the best in your yard with lots of shade garden pictures to provide inspiration and ideas.

Choosing the best plants for a rain garden can be hard. Learn what to look for, and get tons of options for sun or shade on my detailed list.

Hillsides could be tricky to landscape and hard to incorporate in the garden design. These hillside landscaping ideas on a budget will help you solve this problem.

Learn all about landscaping steep slopes, planting design and types for hillside landscaping, landscape paths and steps, terracing

Add these easy-growing native northeast plants to your garden for lots of low-maintenance color through the seasons.

Russian sage is at the top of the list of easy-care garden perennials that you simply buy, plant, and enjoy. Just give them full sun and well-drained soil and enjoy their beauty.

Now's the time to sketch out your plan for beautiful results in the spring. Here's how to get started

Nothing is more inviting than a beautiful plant-lined walkway. If the walkway is in the shade, it will need to be created using plants that don't require much

Creative garden features you can DIY for free using twigs, sticks, and branches. Ideas include trellises and plant supports as well as garden artwork

Hello everyone, how are you today? Welcome to our blog About Gardening. We hope you are very well and looking forward to a new post or Gardening Tutorial. Today we want to share with you

Don't make a newbie mistake! Check out these tips.

In my area, the garden tour season kicks off with the annual Canadian Cancer Society Tour in late May. Not only does the tour support a worthy cause, it is a wonderful opportunity to see local gardens in all their late spring splendour. Today I want to share with you a garden that was a standout on last year's tour. The lot runs wide to the road and so it was hard to get everything in a single shot. This is a view of the central portion of the front garden. In the beginning, Liz Maliki inherited a builder's beige front garden with a few rather nondescript planting beds and some basic hardscaping. What she really wanted was a garden with interesting sight lines, texture, color and a full four seasons of interest. To determine a new layout for her garden, Liz stood at the front of the house in the dead of winter, when there are less visual distractions from foliage and flowers, and devised her plan. The lot she had to work with was a wide rectangle that sloped gently down to the road. Though the plantings were initially unspectacular, Liz was lucky to have inherited some mature trees including some pines and a red maple. In her new design, Liz incorporated a sweeping series of curved flowerbeds, a fresh mix of plants, and new pathway leading to the entrance to the house. Let's take a look at this pretty garden over twenty years in the making and still evolving to this day: Everywhere you look there are beautiful combinations of color and texture. Even when there is little in bloom, this planting bed will still be colorful. Here we are looking at the same bed as in the previous shot, but this time from the opposite angle. The pink flower in the middle foreground is the Tree Peony in the next shot. Tree Peony A closer look at that mix of perennials and shrubs including hosta, blue and golden colored evergreens, a maroon colored Barberry bush, a golden colored Heuchera (to the left of the Barberry) and Zebra grass (middle foreground). Most of the planting beds can be viewed from both sides and a variety of perspectives. The plantings are not stepped in the traditional way: shorter perennials in front, intermediate and then taller perennials at the back. Instead, Liz has made a point of keeping sight lines visually appealing by varying plant heights like notes in a musical score. A few of the perennials in this bed are hightlighted below: a mix of Heuchera (top right), Hosta (left) the unexpected use of Chives (lower left) and a creamy yellow Tree Peony (lower right). Hostas aren't ordinary when you combine a bright, lime-colored cultivar, a deeply-ribbed, solid green one and bookend them with two variegated varieties. What I think Liz has created here is visual music. The busier variegation of the Euonymous is like the lively notes of a violin singing above the deep, mellow notes of a chello or base, which in this case, are the big-leafed hostas. This is the walkway leading to the front door. On the left, boxwood frames a flowerbed filled with Rhododendrons, Euonymus, a Korean Lilac (on the left edge of the picture). And this is a portion of the flowerbed on the opposite side of the front walkway. Two final pictures of the front walkway. That is a pink Weigela cascading down into the picture frame on the right. In this detail shot, Liz has planted a combination of Hosta, Heather (lower left) pink Azalea and a Spirea (lower right corner). In the next post, we will head into the back garden. More Information and Links: Here are all the details you need to know to attend this year's Canadian Cancer Society Tour. I am going to link this post with the Garden Party at Fishtailcottage and to Fertilizer Friday at Tootsie Time.

If you struggle with clay soil, all is not lost. You just have to know which plants work best. These 20 plants are practically guaranteed to thrive in clay!