When striving to create a rich, multi-layered garden, adding a layer of bulbs is an enchanting finishing touch. They’re the ultimate garden accessory. Just as the right necklace can make an outfit, bulbs can round out an existing color scheme in your garden.  ..

As we head into fall and wave goodbye to summer, it's the perfect time to assess your garden and reflect on what worked and what didn't. By recording your findings, you'll be able to refer to them as you make plans for the coming season. The notes and photos you take now will be invaluable as you plan garden projects for the upcoming year and will move you closer to creating the garden of your dreams. ..

If you’ve been following me for any amount of time, you’ve heard me talk about the “re-boot” I’m undertaking in parts of my garden at home. This past year I’ve been able to indulge my plant lust without remorse. I’ve had lots of open ground to work with due to heavy edits I’ve been doing in my front, side, and back gardens.  ..

In the video below, I demonstrate a process of first envisioning a planting concept based on shape, form, texture and color. After which I identify two different groups of plants for two different growing environments in order to recreate the visualized scene.  ..

I'm a plant lover, just like you, so I'm inclined to experiment with new varieties of old favorites as they come to market, and you'll find many of them included in our combos. That said, eGardenGo isn’t intended to be an exhaustive directory of every plant available on the nursery shelves—have you counted how many varieties of pink-toned echinacea, burgundy heuchera, or dwarf red-leaf maples there are out there?   ..

Creating a garden that fits together—one that makes sense and works as a whole—is like a jigsaw puzzle, a word jumble, or really any puzzle that challenges us to create order from chaos. Our puzzle is further complicated by the fact that we're working in four dimensions, if we take the seasonal aspect of our creation into consideration. Though as the pieces, or in our case plants, start falling into place, the overall scene starts shaping up. It begins to make more sense and everything gets a bit easier. But getting started can feel daunting. ..

The current trend toward simpler, tidier gardens points toward using a more restricted palette of plants. While landing on a small number of plants to use in your garden can be an effective means of achieving a cohesive whole, simplicity is not necessarily simple to achieve. But there are at least three good reasons to consider limiting yourself in this way when creating your garden.  ..

Trees with attractive bark add so much to the winter garden. If a tree can pull its weight in the dead of winter, it has a lot going for it and that alone can be plenty of reason to plant it. But the plants I'm showcasing below are more than a one-season-winter-wonder. In addition to a strong showing in other seasons by providing bloom, fall color, or drought tolerance (see individual notes below), I've selected these for their suitability for smaller gardens by virtue of their dwarf stature or relatively slow growth.  ..

I've moved a lot of large plants in my garden over the last year. In doing so, I figured that most would take the disruption in stride and not skip a beat. And most actually did. But now with the glimmer of a new season on the horizon, I'm beginning to see signs of trouble on a few that are signaling how they'll fare.  ..

The most engaging planting combinations are able to strike a delicate balance between having enough different-ness to capture our attention versus enough same-ness to hold the scene together. When considering the extremes, we can easily see how too much variety can feel jarring and chaotic, and how too much sameness can lead us down a path to ho-hum. Just like Goldilocks, we're striving for "just right" — and even then, there's an enormous range of possibilities, so it can be helpful to know what kind of feeling or mood you're trying to evoke. ..

Happy New Year! 2018 is just about a wrap and I'd like to thank you from the bottom of my heart for being a part of it. You're the reason for eGardenGo—I appreciate you being a part of this community of gardens and look forward to our continued growth together!  ..

I love slow-growing, dwarf conifers and find them especially valuable when choosing plants for small gardens where every plant needs to earn its keep—their compact size and year-round good looks consistently earn them a place in my designs. ..