We day-tripped through Provence for 5 days in late July, climbing steep lanes in the hill towns of the Luberon, chartering a boat to view the calanques of Cassis, and watching famous paintings come to life at Carrières de Lumières …

Summer in Provence — what do you think of? Fields of lavender and sunflowers, sun-washed hill towns, buzzing cicadas, hot days and cool nights, a glass of wine at a small table along a cobblestone street? Yes, yes, and yes …

When our connecting flight through London Heathrow was cancelled we unexpectedly had 24 hours for sightseeing. Along with hordes of other tourists, we rode the London Eye …

Garden design aficionados, take note! My second Garden Spark speaker of 2019 will be Thomas Rainer on Thursday, September 19th, 8-9 pm, presenting “Planting in a Post-Wild World: Designing Plant Communities for More Resilient Landscapes.” …

Morning light in the front garden, with Berkeley sedge aglow, a hulking ‘Green Goblet’ agave, and a silvery groundcover of woolly stemodia — this is a summer scene I enjoy before the Death Star gets high in the sky …

Amused by skull-tipped agaves in Dan Johnson’s Denver garden, I’ve given a few of my own agaves the Yorick treatment. Turns out, all sorts of skull beads can be found online. Who knew!? I ordered strings of yellow, orange, and white …

I’m delighted to share that I have two articles in the current issue of Country Gardens (Fall 2019), a wonderful magazine filled with design inspiration and the stories of regular gardeners with vision, enthusiasm, and a love of plants …

August 07, 2019 From such little seeds, what a profusion of flowers! Two evenings in a row this week, my seed-grown datura (Datura wrightii) unfurled more than two dozen blossoms, which shine like spotlights through the night and into the next morning. It’s a superbloom! Here’s how they look as …

Despite its chancy beginning, ‘Purple Pillar’ has thrived, gaining vigor and height each year. Following a wet spring and early summer, when it put on a burst of growth, this hardy hibiscus now stands tall and slender, its showy flowers sporting lavender outer petals with a cherry-red, starburst center …

Many people wouldn’t consider buying a house sandwiched between MoPac expressway, a multi-lane highway with freight trains chugging down the center median, and its neighborhood feeder road. But Cynthia Williams Deegan and her husband, Bobby, have a talent for transforming an unpromising property into an indoor-outdoor paradise …

The Denver Garden Bloggers Fling wrapped up, after 3-1/2 days of touring Denver-area gardens, at Denver Botanic Gardens Chatfield Farms. Chatfield Farms, a 700-acre native plant refuge and working farm in Littleton, has a number of interesting gardens, including a prairie garden designed by Lauren Springer Ogden and Scott Ogden, …

July 22, 2019 The last private garden on the Denver Garden Bloggers Fling tour (June 2019) belongs to Keith and Retha Funk of Centennial, Colorado. When they bought their house in 2011, they inherited some lovely trees but also a tired landscape of overgrown shrubs and too much lawn. Their …

July 21, 2019 Colorful stucco walls! Upcycled metal garden art! Octopus planters! Agaves (atop caged columns) and alliums and poppies! Amusing vignettes! As soon as we stepped off the bus at Denver Garden Bloggers Fling (June 2019), I knew this garden would be one of my tour favorites. Who could …

So much information about gardening with deer comes down to plant lists. Karen aims instead to tell the story of 13 deer-resistant gardens: how each one developed, what the owners envisioned, how they dealt with deer damage and adapted to the presence of deer in their pursuit of a beautiful …