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'Tis the Season for Inspiration
It is time to start a landscaping re-do.
Where do you start? You
can look at garden magazines and books till you are blue in the face and still
not quite feel the “ah-ha” factor. Maybe
if you could visit these gardens in person, see them in 3-D since you seem to
have trouble picturing what it would look like in your yard.
One way to get the full effect is by visiting living examples. On your next trip, work in a couple of famous sample gardens
so that you can begin to see the various garden styles. Historical homes, city gardens, or even public parks now have
display gardens that will vary in their characteristics showing the difference
between an English cottage garden and a formal French one.
So now that
you’ve decided on a style, how do you know which plants to use?
Those used in the Botanical Garden in St. Louis might not work in San
Saba, huh? Well, certainly your
first hunt should be through our pages of plants here at GardenStops.com
! But if you want to see the
plants in person, look around locally for your source of information before
you begin the perspiration of planting time. We here in Texas are blessed with
an ever growing abundance of public gardens, parks, and arboretums as well as
once private gardens that are now open to the public. These can help to not
only show you what a plant looks like, but how it can be used effectively and
what plants it might look best with so that some of the guess work is
eliminated. In the next few months we are going to highlight some of the Texas
arboretums and public gardens that have inspired us.
But we also want to hear from you.
Do you have a local display garden that shows off natives or
low-maintenance plants? Or one
that has a great variety of local annual or perennial color? Do they have a map or legend that allows you to take home a
copy of their plant lists or just tags noting the variety? Email us your favorites (along with a photo if you have one)
and we’ll put you in a drawing for a GardenStops.com
t-shirt! We will start our tour
of Texas’ top garden inspirations next month with the high desert and dusty
plains of West Texas and the Panhandle then move east into the Hill Country.
So stay tuned!
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