The countdown is on: You have only five more days to submit your garden and home design projects into the 2018 Gardenista Considered Design Awards. Enter by midnight Pacific on Friday, June 22, in any of 13 contest categories across Gardenista and Remodelista.
We’ve outlined the basics here, but be sure to read our Rules & FAQs for more details including category descriptions, photo requirements, and entry guidance.
Winning projects will receive a full feature post on Gardenista, Remodelista, or The Organized Home, and each winner will receive a $500 gift card to shop Schoolhouse online or in stores. Professional winners will receive automatic entry into Gardenista’s Architect/Designer Directory.
Details
Readers in the United States and Canada (excluding Quebec) are welcome to enter in the appropriate categories. Please read our Rules & FAQs page for complete entry instructions and contest rules.
For inspiration, here’s a sneak peak at five projects that have been submitted so far this year. (Browse the Gardenista Contest Page to see all entries.)
Don’t forget to enter our contest by submitting up to 10 photos of your project by this Friday, June 22. There are separate contest categories for professional and amateur designers on both Gardenista and Remodelista, and winners get a $500 gift card to shop Schoolhouse.
A career in art direction is a useful grounding for anybody wishing to go into garden design. Sheila Jack‘s career shift was not so much a break as a continuum of research, editing, and presentation. Before designing the pages of Vogue magazine, her first job was for the architect Norman Foster; these visual strands from the past feed into her present-day job as a landscape designer.
We visit the project which turned Sheila’s design ideas into something more three-dimensional: her own urban garden.
“When we added my husband’s garden studio we needed to create a pathway to it,” explains Sheila of the garden’s current layout. “Our children were beyond the need for lawn, so there was scope to include more planting.”
I first met Sheila by the photocopying machine at Tatler magazine, several decades ago. Amid the madness, Sheila stood out as a beacon of clarity, in a crisp white shirt. A few years later I spotted Sheila, ever crisp, at 444 Madison Avenue, a recent arrival at Condé Nast in New York. While I failed to take my job on the 17th floor seriously, Sheila worked hard downstairs, in the scary offices of Vogue. Then she suddenly appeared on Instagram, with beautifully composed pictures of gardens, in focus. How had she got from there to here?
After Vogue, Sheila was art director of Harpers & Queen (before it was gobbled up by Harpers Bazaar). At the Chelsea Flower Show, she recalls, “Harper’s & Queen were the media sponsors of the Laurent Perrier gardens, during the epic Tom Stuart Smith era.” That was when Stuart Smiths’s sophisticated take on meadow planting caused one of the few genuine revolutions at Chelsea, in the 1990s. “Seeing those gardens close up was hugely inspirational,” says Sheila.
“All of my white irises have been propagated by division from two plants bought at the Chelsea sell-off [when designers and stall holders off-load plants at the end of the show, before packing up to go home]. Many of the roses came from Chelsea too,” says Sheila. She started collecting these plants during her time at Harpers.
Sheila enrolled in an intensive one-year design course at the London College of Garden Design at Kew Gardens, where she was recognized with an award for “top student.” She immediately won two awards with the Society of Garden Design as soon as she graduated and her ability with a pencil is evident in the entries.
“There were a whole range of transferable art and design skills,” says Sheila of her two careers. “I enjoy doing pencil sketches to illustrate an idea or convey an atmosphere, combining that with photography and art and architectural inspirations to flesh out the detail.”
“My former life of page layout, editing photography, and art have given me a strong visual reference point,” says Sheila. “I’m interested in detail and how things are made, and how they in turn can be edited to the purest form.”
What does the first year of a newly qualified award-winning designer involve? “I am working on a range of projects from urban London gardens and roof terraces to a beautifully located riverside country garden,” says Sheila. “I’ve also been extending my professional experience by working with more established designers. I had an amazing week as part of Tom Massey’s planting team during the build of his Lemon Tree Trust garden at Chelsea.”
Has Sheila’s new career had an effect on her garden? “The planting is constantly evolving; there are more grasses, with delicate plants like Thalictrum delavayi and Selinum wallichianum. I’m lucky to be designing other people’s gardens now,” she adds, “so there’s not much time for wholesale changes at home.”
Are you designing a new garden or updating a flower bed? Start with our curated guides to Garden Design 101 for our favorite cottage garden Perennials and Annuals. Read more:
It’s weed season. Why make it a fair fight? To defeat the enemy, I prefer a multi-pronged fork that you can push into crevices to tease out roots. A weeding fork can be the best tool to use between pavers, on a brick path, or in a tight corner. Here’s a roundup of 10 sturdy weeding forks to give you the advantage in the garden:
Are you upgrading your collection of garden tools? For more shed basics see our curated selection of Garden Tools and our newly updated 10 Easy Pieces archive. See more of our favorite garden helpers:
The beauty of flowers sometimes makes us believe that appearance is all they have to offer. But like other edible plants, flowers can bring to our plates (and glasses) elements of texture, aroma, and flavor. While some edible flowers have better looks than flavors (I’m looking at you, violas), many others have herbal or sweet personalities that make them valuable ingredients in everything from cocktails to salads to dessert.
Read on for 16 edible flowers that taste as good as they look.
The unopened flower buds are a delicious cooked vegetable, and the fragrant open flowers can be fried into celebratory beignets. Milkweed cordial is a delicious drink, a deeply tinted dark pink; to make it, see Recipe: Milkweed Flower Cordial Captures Summer in a Glass.
Ground Elder (Aegopodium podagraria)
Hyssop (Agastache)
The minty blooms are fantastic in fruit salads as well as mixed drinks, while the anise-flavored flowers work well in savory dishes, especially with grilled fish or in fennel-and-citrus salads. See more growing tips in Hyssop: A Field Guide to Planting, Care & Design.
Wisteria frutescens is a North American native, and less aggressive than the invasive W. sinensis.
Virginia Bluebells (Mertensia virginica)
Yucca (Yucca)
Tell us your favorite edible flower stories. What are you eating, and how?
When you grow the food you eat, it tastes better—and you know exactly what you are eating. Browse our Plant Based Diet archive for recipes. Don’t miss:
In the Southern Highlands an hour’s drive south of Sydney, a region known for its vineyards and mild climate, landscape designer Nicholas Bray encountered sweeping views and a low-slung house with Colorbond metal sheeting on his client’s 100-acre property. “It’s modern and very Australian,” he said.
The challenge? To design a swimming pool easily accessible from the house—but with its own separate identity.
The solution? A pool with a simple silhouette, an open-air pavilion and a strikingly simple Corten steel fence. Grand sweeps of golden grasses connect the pool and pavilion to the larger landscape. And a series of garden improvements—including metal landscape edging—define the curves of a gently sloped lawn to visually connect the main house to the swimming pool pavilion.
Known as Poa lab, low-maintenance tussock grass clumps grow along roadsides in Australia and look their best if cut back every two to three years during the off season.
Inside the pool pavilion is a fireplace. “The pool is oriented north, so the pavilion gets some sun but is shaded by the roof,” Bray said.
Are you designing a new swimming pool (or upgrading an existing one)? Start with our design guide to Swimming Pools 101 in our Hardscape 101 section. Read more:
A new planter—even a very big planter—shouldn’t feel like a lifetime commitment. We went searching for lightweight and luggable pots suitable for patios, terraces, and stoops. Here are 10 of our favorites (all light enough to carry indoors when the weather turns cold):
Looking for outdoor planters (and ideas about plants to put in them)? Browse through all the posts in our newly updated 10 Easy Pieces collection. Don’t miss:
In England, hedgerows froth with a creamy white haze of cow parsley as Anthriscus sylvestris (a cousin of Queen Anne’s lace)rises up from ditches, billowing along roadside verges and lighting up the perimeters of fields and meadows.
These are weeds. Or at least they used to be.
Nowadays cow parsley has found a champion in revered gardener Fergus Garrett, who oversees the gardens at Great Dixter, which everyone agrees are a national treasure. But cow parsley in the flower borders? Most rural gardeners are happy to let this short lived perennial linger, adding bucolic charm to the edges of rural gardens, but only the seriously brave invite cow parsley into the inner sanctum and allow it to feel thoroughly at home. Garrett is one of them.
Nothing sums up England in May like the airy umbels of cow parsley, especially when clustered under equally beguiling hawthorn trees or spilling over a post and rail fence. In the US, it is an early spring flower, peaking in May.
Although cow parsley and Queen Anne’s lace may look very similar, don’t be fooled if you’re planting seeds in a flower bed. Queen Anne’s lace (Daucus carota) has a denser umbel of tiny white flowers and is a safer alternative in the garden—it will self seed, but not as vociferously as cow parsley will.
In the Sussex gardens that Fergus Garrett oversees, cow parsley mingles with emerging perennials, creating a haze of white that floats above mounds of lush new foliage.
At a recent Garden Museum event in London, Garrett talked about his longstanding use of what many others would consider a rampant weed that they wouldn’t let anywhere near their borders. He said he’s currently taking part in a field trial at the Royal Horticultural Society’s gardens at Wisley, putting varieties of cow parsley through their paces. Cultivated forms include the beautiful dark-stemmed Anthriscus sylvestris ‘Ravenswing’ (which looks wonderful interspersed with dark moody flowers) or A. sylvestris ‘Golden Fleece’, which has soft lilac-tinged flowers.
As for a humble weed’s royal connections? When Prince Harry married Meghan Markle last month, white heads of cow parsley were incorporated into florist Philippa Craddock’s sublime flowers for St George’s Chapel, Windsor. Just like much of the native tree foliage and white roses, the peonies, and the foxgloves, it was plucked from Windsor Great Park and the Royal parkland.
When San Francisco landscape architect Loretta Gargan and her partner, the art photographer Catherine Wagner, set out to buy a weekend house in the warmer climes of Marin County just north of the city, they shopped modestly, with big plans for the future.
The pair purchased a 500-square-foot, one-bedroom cottage that was the blight of its neighborhood in Ross, California. Likely built in the 1930s as the guest house to a larger estate since divided, the house had low ceilings and small, dark rooms. Its smallish lot—about 7,500 square feet—was unkempt, full of weeds and mature trees that had sprung up haphazardly, bordered by a fallen fence. But the aging property charmed its new owners and, though the lot’s slope precluded outdoor seating, it had views of a small mountain nearby.
The owners hired architect Jonathan Feldman to overhaul the cottage and add a small new wing, while Gargan and Wagner planned the landscape. They wanted usable outdoor spaces more than anything, so they graded the slope into tiers fit for outdoor dining, sun soaking, container gardening, and swimming in their new sunken concrete pool. For parking, they added a detached garage on the edge of the lot, designed by Feldman and planted with a living roof by the homeowners. Let’s take a closer look.
Photography by Phil Bond, courtesy of Feldman Architecture.
The new wing, pictured here, is 500 square feet split between two levels. The top floor features a master suite with deck, and the bottom floor family room opens onto the garden via full-height glass doors.
There are just two days left to enter our garden design awards! Submit up to 10 photos of your project by this Friday, June 22. There are separate contest categories for professional and amateur designers on both Gardenista and Remodelista, and winners get a $500 gift card to shop Schoolhouse.
Yes, you could make a flytrap from an empty tomato sauce jar or a dish with plastic wrap, but neither of these methods elevates the task of combatting flies in your house. This glass flycatcher, however, does.
Made of handblown glass, the jar is perched on four legs and is available from Swedish shop Artilleriet. Fill it with leftover wine, honey, or anything sweet to attract summer insects (wasps included).
Sweet Chestnut, Castanea sativa: “Beauty in Utility”
Handsome, long-lived, with texture galore, sweet chestnuts in their several varieties are distinguished trees. They are also abundantly generous, in gate posts and nuts, the latter being a cheerful reminder of the holidays.
Above: The fruits of sweet chestnuts in autumn. In the UK, ripening nuts are often ejected from their shells, which cling on to the tree, resembling flowers. Ideally, they will fall in clusters and ripen on the ground, still enclosed in their sharp green spines. The most delicious nuts require more sunshine than the British Isles can guarantee and they are generally imported from Spain, France, and Italy.
In the United States, chestnuts from the sweet chestnut (aka Spanish chestnut) are imported for their superior size and flavor. At one time, the American chestnut (Castanea dentata) formed about a quarter of the tree population in the eastern states before almost total devastation from chestnut blight in the early 20th century. There are signs of life but the most commonly grown sweet chestnut tree in the US is now the Chinese chestnut (C. mollissima).
Above: Although the sweet chestnut is confused with the horse chestnut, it is related to oak and beech. Everything about the sweet chestnut is more beautiful than the horse chestnut: the edible (versus toxic) fruit, the tightly packed coat of spines, the elegant glossy, serrated leaves, the swirling, deeply fissured bark.
A sweet chestnut tree at Burghley House in Lincolnshire, part of the tree population planted there by Capability Brown in the second half of the 18th century. A favorite tree for parkland, old specimens of chestnut are often planted in groups or in lines in historic gardens and landscapes. Sweet chestnuts easily live to 700 years and sometimes for millennia.
Above: The Spanish chestnut is considered to be a medium-large tree, being about 100 feet at maturity. The American chestnut used to tower over it, at 200 feet, while the Chinese chestnut, which has widely replaced the American, is a quarter of that size, at 50 feet. Crucially, it is drought-resistant.
Cheat Sheet
• Chop it, don’t saw it; chestnut is stronger when it is split along the grain.
• Chestnuts used to be a diet staple (ground into a kind of flour) before the introduction of maize and potatoes. Although chestnut is nutritionally similar to wheat, it is naturally gluten-free.
• Save your fingers and buy vacuum-packed sweet chestnuts, in which the three protective layers have been removed.
Above: Fruit is formed at the base of germinated catkins, which cling on, desiccated yet determined, after their duty is done.
Keep It Alive
• Although Castanea has both male and female flowers, it is not self-pollinating. Another chestnut (any variety) is needed, for a crop of nuts.
• Its nickname “Spanish chestnut” is instructive: it flourishes in full sun with well-drained soil. It also does well in high altitudes.
• Chestnuts also need winter cold, for optimum nut production.
The wood of chestnut is high in tannins, giving it impressive durability when left outdoors, untreated. Chestnut woodland is abundant in Sussex and Kent in southern England, traditionally providing poles for the growing of hops (for beer making). Chestnuts have been coppiced here for hundreds of years. Coppicing is a sustainable system in which certain broad-leaved trees are cut down close to the ground, only to re-sprout, straight and multi-stemmed. As farming practices for hops have changed, coppiced wood is used mainly for fencing. Wood shingles on buildings are also made from chestnut.
The sweet chestnut woods next to Great Dixter in East Sussex provide raw materials for the handmade tools and accessories sold in the Great Dixter shop (shown above). For more information, see: The New Ruralism: Barn Style Accessories from England.
Above: Castanea sativa growing in southern England.
Finally, get more ideas on how to successfully plant, grow, and care for sweet chestnut tree with our Sweet Chestnut Tree: A Field Guide.
Interested in other types of trees? Get more ideas on how to plant, grow, and care for various trees (specimen, deciduous, evergreen) with our Trees: A Field Guide.
Arborvitae trees are North American natives that earned their appreciative nickname (arbor vitae translates to “tree of life” in Latin) a few centuries back when Canada’s early French settlers discovered that brewing a tea from thuja bark was a cure for scurvy.
Guaranteed, you’ve seen thuja trees—either in your garden or someone else’s: they’re the evergreen cedar trees with curiously flat, fanned foliage. Depending on the species and cultivar, their height at maturity can range from “shrub” (dwarf thuja bushes can grow to heights of from 15 inches to 10 feet) to “major tree” (giant thuja trees can be 200 feet tall).
Commonly known as white cedars, red cedars, eastern arborvitaes or other nicknames, Thuja trees are hardy, fast-growing workhorses often planted en masse to create windbreaks. Planted in a row in front of a fence, they’ll grow together to create a dense screen within five years.
Is arborvitae the best tree for your garden? Keep reading to find out:
Also known as eastern arborvitae or northern white cedar, T. occidentalis varieties will grow to a height of about 50 feet at maturity (making them medium size trees). They will thrive in spots with either full or partial sun so long as they have well-drained soil.
Some dwarf varieties of thuja to consider: Thuja ‘Fire Chief’ (height of up to 4 feet and has gold-green foliage which turns red in autumn); T. ‘Anna’s Magic Ball’ (a mere 15 inches high, it’s a small-space evergreen shrub), and T. ‘Filip’s Magic Moment’ (height of up to 8 feet and golden foliage).
Cheat Sheet
A fast-growing tree, Thuja makes an effective privacy screen.
A row of arborvitae trees planted at the base of an ugly fence will soon make the backdrop disappear.
With a wide range in shape and size (including 15-inch balls and slender, 20-foot-high pyramids), thuja trees can solve problems in nearly any size garden.
Keep It Alive
Depending on the cultivar, Thuja can be happy in USDA growing zones 2 to 9.
Thujas will be happy in sun or partial shade as long as they can count on well-drained soil.
When planting thuja trees, dig a wide hole, but not too deep—the top of the root ball should sit at or slightly above ground level when you fill in the hole. To help the tree get established, put it on a drip irrigation line or water for 24 hours with a soaker hose twice a week during its first season in the ground.
A few Christmases back, Justine bought a live thuja tree to decorate indoors—and then planted it in her garden after the holidays. Are you thinking of doing the same thing? See DIY: Plant Your Christmas Tree in the Garden.
Are you wondering which tree would be the best choice for your garden? Get ideas from our curated guides to Trees 101 in our Garden Design 101 section. For more evergreen conifers, see our guides to Yew Trees and Cedar of Lebanon Trees. See how some of our favorite trees look in a landscape when they reach maturity:
A visit to their favorite Scandinavian design haunts always surprises and delights the Remodelista editors. New ideas to steal for your own remodel:
Swedish Cabinet Knobs
Swedish designers Malin Bäccman and Fia Berglund are purveyors of top-quality residential hardware including handmade hooks, handles, and knobs (in a variety of solid metals and finishes, including brushed and polished brass, plus copper, aluminum, and steel).
High Back Sofas
A high back sofa shelters you—think of it as a room within a room. See our favorites in this week’s 10 Easy Pieces post.
Wall Mounted Dish Racks
In an attic apartment in Copenhagen, clever storage solutions lurk under the eaves. See more in this week’s Steal This Look post.
Marbleized Trays
Writes Julie: “In our latest book, Remodelista: The Organized Home, we devote almost an entire chapter to trays as organizational tools. Our latest obsession? Jewel-toned, one-off marbleized trays from Sweden’s Studio Formata.”
This is it; today is the last day to enter the 2018 Gardenista and Remodelista Considered Design Awards. You have until the clock strikes midnight Pacific time tonight—Friday, June 22—to submit your projects into any of our 13 categories.
If you haven’t started, you still have time: Just upload up to 10 photos of your garden or home design project, and complete the online Entry Form with photo captions and a brief description of your project. It’s free to enter and you could earn a $500 gift card to Schoolhouse if you win.
Not sure where to start? Browse all 2018 Submissions for inspiration, then head to our Rules & FAQs page for full information, including category descriptions, detailed rules, and photo requirements.
Winning projects will receive a full feature post on Remodelista, Gardenista, or The Organized Home, and each winner will receive a $500 gift card to shop Schoolhouse online or in stores. Professional winners will receive automatic entry into Gardenista’s Architect/Designer Directory.
Eligibility
Readers in the United States and Canada (excluding Quebec) are welcome to enter in the appropriate categories. Please read our Rules & FAQs page for complete entry instructions and contest rules.
This last full weekend of June, we’re savoring the month’s most beautiful blooms and the summer stretched out ahead of us. More on our radar:
Submissions for the 2018 Considered Design Awards are officially closed, but take a look through all of the entries here.
For New Yorkers without gardens of their own (almost everybody), there is Garden Volunteer Day at the Espiritu Tierra Community Garden in Williamsburg. RSVP and get your hands dirty prepping the gardens for summer.
Attention, Brooklyn garden lovers: Community activists are fighting new high rises in Crown Heights that would block sunlight in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Learn more.
There are more ways to use roses in a garden than there are roses—and as you know, there are many thousands of kinds of climbing, rambling, heirloom, floribunda, hybrid tea, and miniature roses.
Are you designing a new rose garden, reviving a neglected collection, or just trying to decide which scented climber would be the best choice for an arbor? For inspiration, we’ve rounded up 10 ways to use roses in some of our favorite gardens:
Rosarian David Austin describes the Sissinghurst specimen as a “massive rambler: one of the biggest of all climbing roses in this country,” and it certainly dominates the space. Originally four were planted to cover the axes, but they were thinned out to just one.
“At Tattenhall Hall in Cheshire, a Jacobean manor house that sits in a picturesque English village, the line between cultivation and wilderness is finely drawn,” writes our contributor Clare Coulson. See more at Wild Child: An Intoxicating English Garden at Tattenhall Hall.
Roses as a Refrain
At Torrecchia Vecchia (an hour’s train ride south from Rome), garden designer Dan Pearson restored 15 acres of the landscape of a 1,500-acre property on which an entire medieval village once stood. Throughout the garden, white and pale pink climbing and rambling roses envelop walls; the repetition creates unity throughout the landscape. See more at Paradise Found: Designer Dan Pearson’s Modern Garden for a Medieval Castle.
Roses on a Budget
After a remodel laid waste to my back yard, to get rid of the mud and the dust my husband set a budget of $250. Like many post-remodelers, we were out of cash and in a state of sticker shock. I headed to Home Depot to buy some sensible shrubs, but instead came home with 16 big-box-store roses that haven’t stopped blooming since. See more of my Iceberg rose bushes, climbing New Dawn roses, and generic landscape roses labeled simply “Rose, white” at Landscape on a Budget: The $250 Instant Rose Garden.
English Roses
At David Austin’s headquarters, “each year 450,000 roses will be crossed, creating 150,000 seedlings that are initially grown in huge greenhouses before 10,000 are selected to grow on. It takes eight years, and a long process of elimination, to release new roses to the market. From those initial seedlings, around three new roses will be eventually released,” writes our contributor Clare Coulson. See more at Shopper’s Diary: David Austin Roses in Shropshire.
Cottage Garden Roses
In modern English cottage gardens roses engulf a trellis, rub shoulders with herbaceous perennials, and are encourage to spill over picket fences. See more in 10 Ideas to Steal from English Cottage Gardens.
Monster Roses
Climbing roses are an effective way to light up shaded areas. At Kiftsgate Court in England, the famous Kiftsgate rose, planted in the 1930s, sprawls up through the trees along one side of the garden and is reputedly one of the largest roses in England.
“When visitors to Sissinghurst admired the endless brick walls that were trained with languorous roses, hydrangeas, and clematis, Vita Sackville-West pointed out that all houses have exterior walls that can be covered with abundant climbers,” writes our contributor Clare Coulson. “Well-trained climbers add another layer of texture to a house, as well as lush foliage and seasonal color. And if you can train scented climbers up high, then they will fragrance your bedrooms too.”
A few weeks ago a rare thing landed in our in-box: before-and-after photographs of a Florida cottage built in 1935. Before: decrepit, with a sagging roof and a front porch straight out of an episode of Hoarders. After: a charming, cheerful garden and house. The transformation was extraordinary.
Even more exciting, the designer and homeowner Mary Maslow and her husband, Tim, also sent spreadsheets to show the budget, down to the cost of the paint. Here’s a rare look at the nuts and bolts, so to speak, of a landscaping project.
House: Built in 1935 in Winter Park, Florida; “a two-one, 750-square-foot home with a detached, one-and-a-half-car garage featuring a full, one-one, 500-square-foot apartment above, and a studio space attached,” Mary says.
Purchase price: $199,000.
Scope of the project: “It required a full gut renovation,” Mary says, including a new roof, removal of large trees in the front yard, a paint job, siding, and landscaping and hardscaping.
Armed with the couple’s spreadsheets, we also pored over the details of the interior overhaul, from how much the kitchen cost to the DIYs that saved them some pennies, on Remodelista (see The $65,000 Whole-House Overhaul: An Eco-Minded Florida Cottage Transformed, Budget Secrets Included for the full rundown). Today we’re taking a look at the exterior, landscaping, and hardscaping, all completely overhauled by the Maslows.
When they first saw it, the falling-down shack was covered in so much wild Florida growth that the Maslows almost missed it. “We were looking at a different house across the street and I happened to turn around and notice it poking out of the overgrowth,” Mary Maslow says. “I said to my husband, ‘Now that would be a fun restoration.’
“It went on the market two weeks later. In an area known for tearing down small, dilapidated houses to build new, we were ecstatic to have the opportunity to save it from the landfill,” she says.
When the Maslows found it, the house had a sagging porch and the roof was in dire need of repair. The couple set about restoring the exterior of the cottage: stripping the original doors and windows themselves, with plenty of elbow grease; replacing some of the siding with GAF WeatherSide Fiber Cement Wavy Shingle Siding, to match the existing; and painting the tired exterior in Behr’s Lunar Surface with Ultra Pure White trim. (A genius tip: They added a drop of black tint “to hide dust and dirt,” Maslow says.)
Painting and siding were, in the end, the biggest part of the Maslow’s expenses for the exterior of the cottage, coming in at $4,730.94, including some paid help from a pro.
Before
After
The couple allocated part of their landscaping budget to digging up two huge, “very invasive” camphor trees growing perilously close to the front of the house—and blocking almost all interior light. They hired a local crew to take them out; while they were at it, the Maslows had the team trim about eight gnarly old oaks in the backyard.
The total for all of the tree work? $775. “After the camphors were torn down, we had them turned into mulch and spread it around the outside of the house,” Maslow says. “Apparently camphor mulch is very good at repelling unwanted insects.” (See some healthy, unobtrusive camphor trees in-situ in Garden Visit: Beautiful Bones at Cape Town’s Vergelegen Winery.)
Florida-Friendly Landscaping
The Maslows left the excavation and sod installation to the pros.
The total: $2,572.40
Another big portion of the exterior budget: tearing down the dilapidated screen porch in favor of a new, open deck that brings more light into the interiors. The couple hired a team to pressure-treat the existing posts and encase them with weather-resistant fiber cement trim for stability. Total: $1,075.45.
The Final Numbers
Throughout, the couple opted for simple hardscaping, including new concrete curbing leading to the front door and around back ($1,800). All told, hardscaping costs came in at $6,285.
Exterior: Paint, Siding, Porch
Budget: $5,500
Actual: $5,806.39
Difference: $306.39 over budget
Landscaping: Trees, Plants, and Hardscaping
Budget: $7,000
Actual: $8,857.40
Difference: $1,857.40 over budget
Though the Maslows came in over budget on both the exterior and landscaping, they say they were still surprised how much they could save. “There is a lot of planning that goes into the design and livability of everything you plant, but it is easily the biggest bang for your buck,” Maslow says. “It’s also so simple to DIY.”
N.B.: A testament to curb appeal: We spotted online that the house recently sold for $400,000—that’s $2o1,000 more than the Maslows bought it for in 2014. See the listing here.
If you are planning a landscape overhaul or just a minor rehab, start with our curated Garden Design 101 guides to Exteriors & Facades, Driveways, and Decks & Patios. For ways to save money on your landscaping overhaul, consult our posts:
What could make more sense than solar-powered outdoor lighting? But sensible too often comes in basic-at-best packaging. Fortunately, a team of designers at French teak furnishings company Les Jardins has been on the case.
Powered by LED panels that charge just by being left outside, Les Jardin’s solar lanterns are not only better looking than their competition but more finely tuned: the owner’s electrical engineer son and a collaborator applied power management software that they created for Italian race carts to the engineering. That translates to brighter, longer-lasting lights that are energy efficient, water resistant—and evocative of St. Tropez poolsides. Come see.
Les Jardin’s portable solar lanterns are 12-watt LED and have four switch positions: off, low, high, and a motion detector setting. The lithium batteries are good for at least eight hours on standby mode and are rechargeable by the sun or via a USB port. For the lowdown on how solar lighting works and its many applications, go to Hardscaping 101: Solar Lighting.
To fully light your landscape, see our curated guide to Outdoor Lighting 101. And take a look at:
Honesty is honestly loved—for its long performing time, early color, and the handsome shape of the plant. Not to mention its jagged heart-shaped leaves, cruciform flowers, and flat disks of seeds that continue to develop in hue and texture over summer. Whether white or vibrant lilac, honesty does the job of brightening a shady spot in a way that is rarely planned.
In the Lunaria genus are annual, perennial, and biennial species. Most commonly spotted in gardens is L. annua, a flower that self-seeds freely and pops up in unexpected places.
In spring, honesty creeps up on you by gaining height while other herbaceous things are still hugging the ground. It gives a hint of the height and structure to come, with summer’s spires. Being a self-seeder, it sprouts in places that are hard to reach with a trowel, even if you’d thought of planting one there.
Unlike say, allium, the flowers of Lunaria bear no resemblance to the seed heads. Like allium, it is good-looking at every stage. Planted in an awkward corner between a hedge and a building, it softens the scene early on, while fading into the background when everything else catches up. Lunaria is part of the Brassica family.
Honesty has a way of choosing the best spots where its color and leaf shape are seen at their best advantage, with acid green of euphorbia or Smyrnium perfoliatum (shown). They hold their own on a woodland garden floor but benefit from thinning, so that the crowd does not become too dense. When happy, they can grow to heights of two feet and almost as wide.
The default version of Lunaria annua is purple-mauve. White is a variation but for something that works twice as hard there is the variegated honesty (Lunaria annua var. albiflora ‘Alba variegata’). With leaves that are outlined in marbled silver, it would be a valuable addition in a white garden.
Some forethought in sowing honesty seeds (remembering that they won’t flower until two years later) could lead to transformative color combinations. Shown here, a whole range of purples developing over the season at Great Dixter.
Cheat Sheet
Despite its name, Lunaria annua, honesty is a biennial. The perennial version, mauve-white, is Lunaria rediviva, with elliptical rather than round seed cases.
Variegated honesty, with marbled leaves, is a useful cut flower, with good value in its heart-shaped leaves as well as its flowers.
Honesty is a European native and is hardy to zone 4. In the USDA, various varieties will thrive in growing zones 2 to 10.
Keep It Alive
Leave the seed cases for decoration but take some seeds for yourself as well.
Remove self-sown seedlings if there are too many; sow seeds when the cases become papery.
Honesty thrives in any kind of soil that is moist and well-drained, sheltered or exposed, in sun or shade.
The rocky coast of Maine is known for being a little weather-worn, with Down East charm: old gray Adirondack chairs, hardy plantings that can stand the salt air, and outdoor showers for washing off the sand. It might be because of Maine’s down-to-earth people, or—more likely—because little needs to be added to its spectacular natural landscape of beaches, craggy coves, and quiet marshes, but Maine gardens are best let be. Still, there are a few classic components to a Maine coast garden to steal for your own. Here are a few.
Downlights in a landscape will focus attention exactly where you need it at night, with minimal light pollution from glare and excessive brightness. By pointing toward your feet, downlights make it safer to walk on dark paths without creating skyglow, which obscures the stars overhead.
Are you looking for discreet downlights to mount on an outdoor wall, in a stairwell, or at the edge of a path? Here are 10 stylish choices that won’t create light pollution.