Tag: Garden Ideas to Steal

The Food Forward Garden, by Christian Douglas: A Manual that Explains How to Design a Beautiful and Productive Landscape

Flipping through The Food Forward Garden, the first thing you notice isn’t the fruits and vegetables—and that’s intentional. Landscape designer Christian Douglas has been creating backyard kitchen gardens in Northern California for more than 12 years; in that time he has learned that clients are much more likely to tend and harvest from the garden, if it’s also a beautiful and inspiring place to spend time. So it is no surprise that each garden in his new book is as pretty as it is productive.

From a small city backyard bordered with raised beds to chef Tyler Florence’s elaborate, terraced kitchen garden, Douglas shows us the wide range of what he calls “food forward” gardens—gardens in which the food is brought forward rather than being hidden away in a back vegetable patch. Douglas believes that vegetables, fruits, herbs, and berries should share the prime real estate in our yards with patios, pools, and even the front walk. “By learning how to integrate food into our outdoor spaces, we can make better use of our time and resources,” says Douglas. These gardens aren’t designed to feed a whole family, he adds: “We are looking for people to engage more and grow something.”

The breathtaking landscapes in this book are also an invitation to readers. Douglas believes that people might be more swayed by images of beautiful, aspirational yards than a workaday, how-to guide. This is not to say that The Food Forward Garden is not packed with practical advice—it is, especially the second half of the book, which covers growing tips and specific plants—but in this book visual inspiration is always hand-in-hand with the science of growing food.

Here are 7 ideas to steal from this new book that blurs the line between backyard farming and high-end landscape design:

All photos excerpted from The Food Forward Garden by Christian Douglas (Artisan Books). Copyright © 2024. Photography by Sasha Gulish.

1. Grow food in view.

Above: Douglas learned through experience that his clients were much more likely to harvest the food in their gardens if they could see it from their windows.

The kitchen garden should be close to the kitchen. If it’s far away, it’s much less likely to be used. But perhaps even more important, Douglas says it should be right in sight of where you cook. “When it’s in view from the house, you can see when your strawberries are ready to harvest, you’ll know exactly when your broccoli heads are ready and not three days later when they start to go to flower,” he says. “People tend to eat more from the garden and learn faster when they’re seeing the garden several times a day.”

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October 22, 2024
10 Ideas to Borrow From Japanese-Inspired Gardens – Gardenista

It’s no coincidence if Japanese gardens remind you of those scene-in-a-shoebox dioramas you made in grade school.

A Japanese garden is a miniature world full of abstract shapes–rocks, gravel, and cloud-pruned plants–designed to represent the larger landscape of nature. And Nature. For centuries, Zen Buddhist monks and other Japanese landscaping designers have been trying to provoke deep thoughts, with design elements such as raked gravel paths and moss checkerboards and tiny bonsai trees trained to look permanently windswept.

A Deep Question: How do you channel all those centuries of serenity to add a bit of Zen to your garden?

The Answer: Steal one or more of our favorite 10 garden ideas from Japan:

Featured photograph by Ye Rin Mok, for Creative Spaces, from LA Noir: Architect Takashi Yanai’s Humble-Chic Bungalow.

Japanese Maple Trees

Above: A Japanese maple, in all its glory, stands in front of a home in Kagoshima, Japan. Photograph by Hironobu Kagae, from “Spend Every Day with Peace of Mind”: A Labor-of-Love Family Home in the Japanese Countryside.

Plant a lacy Japanese maple. There are hundreds of different varieties of Acer palmatum, the maple tree native to Japan. With gracefully articulated leaves and diminutive stature (most don’t grow taller than 30 feet), Japanese maples tuck themselves easily into nearly any size garden. Varieties with multi-branched trunks have a sculptural quality and become a natural focal point in the garden.

For more ideas, see Japanese Maples: A Field Guide to Planting, Care & Design.

Landscape Rocks

Above: Boulders as sculpture at a Japanese dry garden in Ithaca, NY. Photograph by Don Freeman, from Designer Visit: A Gray and Green Garden at Tiger Glen.

Use rocks as a design element. In Japanese gardens, the pleasing shapes of large rocks and craggy boulders are reminders of the larger natural landscape that surrounds us. Depending on the size and shape, a rock also can serve as a functional element–as seating or a table–in the garden.

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October 18, 2024
Silver Sands Motel: How Melissa Reavis of Hollander Design Redesigned its Landscape

The Silver Sands Motel in Greenport, NY, opened in 1957 as a laidback motel that felt more like a beach home away from home than a fussy hotel. When the property changed hands a few years back, the new owners were keen to keep the family-oriented spirit of this beloved destination alive. “They wanted to honor what Silver Sands had been and try to retain that sense of nostalgia, while still creating a modern, comfortable destination for new travelers,” says Melissa Reavis, a landscape designer at Hollander Design, the landscape design firm tasked with updating the surrounding property.

Sitting at the end of a wooded road, Silver Sands is sited on the Peconic Bay along 1,400 feet of sandy beach. Having worked on many residential properties throughout the East End and the North Fork, Reavis and her team were well aware of the challenges of the coastal wetland location. “Out in Long Island there’s extreme deer pressure,” she says. “And this site had dense clay soil, a high water table, and salt winds.”

The Hollander Design team developed a new master plan that kept much of the original landscape’s spirit, but wove in more garden beds, planted predominantly with a native plant palette that supports local birds and pollinators. “We tried to help highlight that unique ecosystem that surrounds Silver Sands,” says Reavis. “And because we were so careful about what we brought in and that were reflective of the natural environment, the property is still fully maintained without the use of any chemicals, and minimal irrigation and intervention.”

Here are 10 lessons everyday gardeners can take away from this inspiring project:

Photography by John Musnicki, courtesy of Hollander Design.

1. Start with a site inventory.

Above: In the research and planning stage, Reavis made sure to check out what plants were thriving on the property—and just beyond.

“We started out just by taking stock of what was there and what actually was surviving,” says Reavis. “In such a tough environment, you have to really go in with no ego and say, ‘What is already doing well?’ because that’s going to help ensure that whatever we plant can also survive.” Gardeners could do the same on their own property (and even on nearby yards and parks).

2. Assess the water table.

Above: A melange of grasses.

While gardeners often get their soil tested to learn its composition, Reavis says they’re often unaware of where they sit on the groundwater table. “As long as you know water isn’t within the first 24 inches of soil, then you have a dry site,” says Reavis. “At Silver Sands if we dug even 12 inches down, the holes would start to fill with water.” To determine where your land sits in relation to the water table, simply dig a hole. Because of the high water table, Reavis was inspired to plant rushes, which are accustomed to wet roots, in the perennial beds. “They’re a really beautiful native type of grass that I had never planted in a garden environment before, so it’s actually helped expand my own palette,” she adds.

3. Save the trees.

Above: None of the mature oak and pine trees were cut down.

With the exception of some dwarf spruces in the courtyard, Hollander Design left all the mature trees on the site. “I didn’t have to cut down a tree, which is almost unheard of for new construction,” says Reavis. “You walk onto that space and it feels like it’s been there forever because the trees are still there.” If you’re building new or renovating, work with your landscaper to preserve as many trees as you can.

4. Strengthen an indoor-outdoor connection.

Above: Planters right outside some guest room doors.

The hotel owners knew that the flow from the interior to exterior was key, so they shared the interior design plans with Hollander Design from the very start. “The room’s colors dictated some of the garden palette, especially within the private gardens,” says Reavis. “For instance, we would take some of the peaches that we were finding in the interiors and we would select an ‘Autumn Joy’ sedum because we knew it would come up in that same peach.”

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June 25, 2024
Chelsea Flower Show: The Best Ideas From 2024’s Show Gardens

The one certainty at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show is an endless stream of covetable plants and clever ideas—this year there’s heaps of innovation as designers lead the way in rethinking materials, construction and how to create resilient, future-proof gardens. Here are a few of the ideas we took note of at the 2024 show.

Photography by Clare Coulson, except where noted.

Deconstruct your planters.

Above: Chelsea first-timer Giulio Giorgi’s inventive design—offset with beautiful silvery resilient planting—won the inaugural RHS Environmental Innovation Award. He used 3D-printed terracotta bricks to build curvaceous planters that were inspired by keyhole gardens. The pieces are simply stacked together and held in place with poles—no concrete or power tools necessary—and can be easily rebuilt when he moves it to its eventual home. Photograph by Gary Morrisroe.

Just add water.

Above: Designer Tom Bannister illustrates how much impact you can achieve in a tiny space with his Ecotherapy container garden, a sensuous and immersive space with a hanging green wall providing the backdrop to a rill and a sequence of pools crafted from hyper-tufa containers. A small bench provides a place to sit and take in the soothing scene, surrounded by lush planting with ferns, hostas, tiarella and rodgersia.

Focus on foliage first.

Above: There’s always one garden that’s almost impossible to walk away from, and Tom Stuart-Smith’s transporting design for the National Garden Scheme certainly ticks that box. A stone trough, a cleft oak building, chairs that aged in his own Hertfordshire garden for years—these elements all add to the soothing aesthetic, but it’s the nearly entirely green and white planting that immediately lowers the heart rate. Exquisite azaleas, seas of foxgloves are played off against the most beautiful foliage from Aralia cordata, Farfugium japonicum, Maianthemum and the delicate woodlander Saruma henryi—all of which are a potent reminder to focus on foliage first when planning planting schemes. (See The Maestro’s Return: Tom Stuart-Smith at the Chelsea Flower Show.)

Patchwork your paving.

Above: The spirit of Sarah Price’s trail-blazing garden from last year’s Chelsea looms large at this year’s show from plant choices (fragrant Elaeagnus, beautiful pines, painterly iris) to the focus on handcrafted details, but it’s her patchwork paving, in which irregular paved paths sit alongside deconstructed gravels, that popped up time and again. Here in Ann-Marie Powell’s Octavia Hill garden, it provides the perfect foil to an intensely colorful planting, rich with foxgloves, irises, verbascums, geums and swathes of poppies.

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May 23, 2024
Leslie Needham Design: 8 Ideas to Steal from Her Gardens in Bedford, NY

This is part of a series with Perfect Earth Project, a nonprofit dedicated to toxic-free, nature-based gardening, on how you can be more sustainable in your landscapes at home.

“A garden needs a heartbeat,” says Leslie Needham, founder of her eponymous design firm in Bedford, NY. And Needham will be the first to admit that her former English-style garden—tightly clipped hedges, filled with plants originating from around the world—didn’t quite have one. “It was pretty stagnant,” she says. But when she looked down at the Mianus River Gorge, a protected stretch of land filled with native plants that abuts her property, she saw a flourish of birds, animals, insects. It thrummed with activity—it had a heartbeat.

Working with Andrea Spunberg, a senior designer at her firm, who was also one of Needham’s first landscape design students when she taught at the New York Botanical Garden, she began incorporating native plants into existing beds, converting areas of lawn into meadow and letting plants grow more freely and openly. Soon phloxes and asters courted butterflies and bees. Shrubs like bayberry and Fothergilla provided shelter for wildlife. And grasses and sedges, like little bluestem and carex, offered four season beauty.

Her new design philosophy focuses on “blurring the edges horticulturally to provide a connection, as Doug Tallamy encourages, to the natural landscape around us,” she says. “There’s a comfort that comes when a planting is correct for its environment,” says Needham. “It just feels of a place.” Spunberg agrees, “It feels alive.”

Below, Needham and Spunberg share eight ways to make your garden spring into life.

Photography of Leslie Needham Design.

1. Embrace the vernacular.

Above: Leslie and Andrea stand in front of Needham’s greenhouse. The two do extensive research of the native flora for each project, reading extensively, walking in local parks to see what’s growing and where, and studying the conditions of the property before coming up with a plant palette.

“Architecturally, I understood how a house needs to fit into its setting. It was built in a certain style for a certain reason to a certain scale,” says Needham. “But then I realized, there’s a vernacular in the landscape too and you get it through native plants. I now think of genius loci: what is the spirit of this place and how do you get it?” For Spunberg, who grew up in Hungary, conserving natural resources by gardening with native plants was part of her upbringing. When she moved to the states, she brought this sustainable approach with her, gravitating to native plants in her designs out of resourcefulness but also because she is totally smitten with them. “Wildflowers are so much joy,” she says. “I love the understated beauty, the life they bring, and the connection to the wilder landscape.”

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May 8, 2024