Are you ignoring the coolest feature of a crape myrtle?
If I asked you to tell me about crape myrtles, what would you say? My guess is the first thing you’d mention is the fact that the flowers are pretty ...
Winter plant damage: watch for these 3 problems
If you’re like a lot of homeowners, you’ve been looking at your landscape plants with a little bit of worry lately. The cold has been brutal. If the Weather Channel ...
Protecting your landscape from winter storm damage
Winter storm Jonas (why are we naming them again?) is barreling towards us, and that’s caused a number of friends to send me panicked texts and Facebook messages like “will ...
Plants Map: because paper gets wet and we forget stuff
I’m always on the lookout for new tech tools, especially ones that could make life easier for my clients. A few months ago I stumbled across Plants Map, a cloud-based ...
Outdoor Living, Virginia plants
Case study: An Alexandria landscape design all about the dog
This was a great Alexandria landscape design project. Sometimes you roll up to a new potential client’s home and you see something that makes you say, “we’re totally working together.” ...
Creating a book-themed reading garden
I was a voracious reader as a child. It didn’t matter what you put in front of me, if it had letters imprinted upon it I would read it. Books, ...
Case Study: Virginia Landscape Design with Native Plants
Several months ago I got a call to do a Bristow landscape design project (for those not in the know, Bristow is a little town in Prince William County, Virginia). ...
Do landscape professionals hate native plants?
One of the benefits of being quite possibly The Most Approachable Guy in the World is I get into a lot of conversations. When these conversations are with folks from the ...
Your fall landscape is boring if you don’t know about these 8 plants
The great thing about this time of year is that the days are cooler (well mostly, it’s supposed to hit 87 today), the humidity drops, and we start to shake ...
Proper tree spacing and selection: what it is and why you need to know it
When I design a landscape there’s an order of operations that I always follow. Hardscape elements (decks, patios, walls, etc) get designed first, followed by trees, and then shrubs and ...