About a half-century ago Reginald Farrar discovered the butterfly bush or buddleia in Kansu, China. Every June this delightful shrub becomes a purple waterfall of fragrant flowers.
Prune immediately after flowering or by picking the blossom sprays for the house. Plant in a rich, well-drained soil, and sunny location. While the blooms open in profusion in [...]

YardShare is a brilliant new site with a very simple underlying idea: consolidate pictures of homeowner’s yards onto one website, and make the characteristics of these yards easily searchable. Let’s face it, how many of us at one time or another have typed in, “patio pictures” for example, in a Google search. What [...]

Backyard ponds are for the enjoyment of you, your family and guests, such as birds, butterflies, frogs, and neighbors, but you will want to put out the “Unwelcome” mat to troublesome guests such as algae.
While a little algae is needed for a healthy pond, if given half a chance, it will take over.
Sometimes chemicals are [...]

Once you have your backyard pond designed and built, it’s time to
start gardening.
First a note about koi ponds and plants. If you are planning to keep koi, as mentioned in the first installment of this article, you can count on them destroying your plants. However, if you created tiers for potted plants, then the [...]

Now that you have your pond designed, here are some tips for installing it. If you haven’t read the first part on design, read this first.
This is the most difficult part for most; while the designing, adding the plants (and fish if desired) and maintaining a lovely water garden can be a great deal of [...]

A pond, whether a water garden or koi pond, brings a magical beauty to a garden. This will often be the focal point of your yard and a favorite spot for visitors. Speaking of visitors, the pond is sure to attract interesting wildlife as well from birds and dragonflies to frogs and larger animals, depending [...]

Many gardeners would love to have their very own backyard pond, but they’re afraid to try building one themselves because it sounds difficult or complicated. It’s not actually that difficult though, especially if you follow some simple guidelines.
1. First you need to decide where your pond will reside in your yard. You can choose to [...]

Some gardens and landscape areas just do not have the appropriate type of soil to grow beautiful perennials. Because of this challenge that you may face in your desire to raise these lovely flowers, you may want to consider planting them in raised beds.
What is a raised bed?
A raised bed is simply a boxed area [...]