Magazine Gardening

Awesome Blog Alert:  Dirt Simple.  I think it's a sort of acronym for landscape designer Deborah Silver of the Greater Detroit area.  From what I can tell her clients are pretty wealthy and the design is mostly quite formal, definitely not my style.  However, this blog is a wealth of information about all things garden-related, from design to horticulture.  I highly recommend it.  Her container plantings are spectacular and I'm sure you'll glean some inspiration from them.

Her colleague, Rob, describes magazine gardening as that which shows no evidence of sloppy living.  Clipped, edited, staged, divorced from reality.  I bring this up because last weekend we went to four gardens on the Garden Conservancy Open Days schedule.  Our first garden was Margaret Roach's, of A Way to Garden blog fame.  I never really got into this blog, somehow.  I think it's the format.  If I can't peruse it easily it's not enjoyable for me to read.  However, she has a huge following, and is quite personable.  Two surprises, though:  her garden is not that large, and the back of the property rises quite steeply.  I asked my mother if she preferred going uphill or downhill (she complains about going down the steps to my back garden).

Margaret's front yard.

From way up the hill.

 Her house was built in the 1880's but the clapboards were perfectly smooth so I'm guessing they're new?

The next "house" was actually an estate that had been turned over to the State of New York.  It was way up high  in the mountains, in horse country.  It had various formal garden rooms, but I didn't feel well at this point so I didn't take any pictures.  I did see a Monarch butterfly in the cutting garden, though.  I haven't seen one in a long time.

The next house was kind of "jungle-y," again - not my style.  She said she was creating a native landscape.  A lot of her plantings seemed huge, and crowded.  But it was obviously well cared for.

The last house was Lynden Miller's house in Sharon, Connecticut.  She is a garden design who's worked at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.  I saw her garden in Fine Gardening magazine. The pictures in this article made it seem like her garden was huge.  It was not.  It's changed some from the pictures but it's still beautiful.  I was also surprised that her house was on a busy street.

Of course I had to take pictures of her house.

 This garden was lovely - my favorite.