foliage

A Phormium flowers

by Rebecca Sweet 7 June 2011

This year my ‘Sea Jade’ phormium surprised me by sending up a few tall stalks of flowers for me to enjoy.  Phormiums (aka: Flax) don’t always bloom around here, but I think due to our very wet spring they’ve  decided to reward our patience by showing us what they’re really capable of! Phormiums are one [...]

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So you want to create a no-lawn front garden?

by Rebecca Sweet 22 May 2011

As a garden designer, I’ve noticed a growing trend over the past few years: more and more people are wanting to replace their unused, water chugging, labor intensive front lawn with a beautiful low-water, low-maintenance garden. These days it seems no-lawn gardens make up about 75% of my business.  The remaining 25% are people who’d [...]

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Opposites Attract in the garden

by Rebecca Sweet 9 May 2011

I love all gardens. I don’t think there’s a single style that I don’t appreciate.   And that’s part of the charm of gardeners – we’re all so different yet we all appreciate one another’s passion.  Sometimes the differences are subtle, sometimes they’re as opposite as night and day. But either way, part of the [...]

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Garden Designers Roundtable – Mixing Edibles & Ornamentals

by Rebecca Sweet 22 February 2011

Remember when having a vegetable garden meant a collection of raised beds, or a few tomato plants in a pot?  Instead of banishing them to out-of-the-way areas, these days, edibles are everywhere in the garden – mixed with ornamentals, scrambling out of recycled containers, and clambering up apartment walls. This topic of this month’s Garden [...]

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My Favorite Winter Plants

by Rebecca Sweet 2 January 2011

I’ve just returned from Lake Tahoe, where anything green (besides the pine trees) was buried beneath six to eight feet of snow.  Even the poor trees were hunched over, already tired from bearing the heavy load of snow draped across their shoulders.  While the snowy landscape is truly stunning, I must admit that now that [...]

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Wordless Wednesday – Today’s Morning Walk

by Rebecca Sweet 1 December 2010

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Celebrating Regional (and Client) Diversity – Part 2

by Rebecca Sweet 27 October 2010

I don’t know what it is, but I just LOVE designing gardens for people who aren’t from California.  Or the United States, for that matter.  I think it’s because I live in Northern California where the majority of the population are from someplace other than Northern California. Earlier this year, I wrote a post with [...]

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Fall’s Fantastic Light

by Rebecca Sweet 25 October 2010

. There’s so many things I love about Fall – the holidays, the food, the smell of the heater turning on for the first time, putting the extra blanket on the bed and the way the garden begins to quiet down. , I think one of my favorite things, however, is the way the sun’s [...]

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