Blog
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Week 5: Adding Trees to My Phoenix Garden — Meet Bubba, Our Desert Willow
One of the best ways we’ve found to discover garden inspiration is by opening our door and taking a walk around. If it’s growing near our house, without an irrigation system in the middle of a wash with full sun, I feel like the odds are good that it can make it in our yard.…
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Week 4 Vines in a Phoenix Garden: Bougainvillea, Jasmine, and Snail Vine
One of my main focuses in our hygge garden is to go vertical. It is actually surrounded by walls on 3 sides, as a courtyard. I would never have a room in my house have 3 bare walls. If this is going to feel like a garden room, all the interesting stuff can’t stay on…
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Week 3 Spring Garden Update: Early Growth in Our Phoenix Hygge Garden
We’ve been hard at work this week, mostly in the front courtyard — the space we now call the Hygge Garden. And we finally have progress. We’ve gone from an empty courtyard to a space with real, visible life. There have already been successes and failures, but the biggest surprise has been the plants that…
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Mediterranean Garden Inspiration for Phoenix: What I Learned in Italy and France
“La perfection est dans les détails, mais la perfection n’est pas un détail.” -Leonardo da Vinci What?That’s exactly what we asked our tour guide. I promise — it’s much easier to guess the meaning when you see it rather than hear it in French. Perfection is in the details, but perfection is not a detail.…
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A Quiet Morning in My Phoenix Garden: Day 7 Reflections
Have you ever had an idea and at the same time known you had to try it? That’s what I had – a title, a concept, and an “I have to” all at once. Combined with “that sounds uncomfortable – all that sharing.” How unintentionally English of me. I dove in for the first week…
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Adapting to a Phoenix Garden: Desert Reality Check (Day 6)
We were walking through a beautiful nursery — the kind where most of the plants are way out of our price range — with friends visiting from the Northeast. They love plants, so we wanted to show them things they’d never see at home. Pistachio trees. Kumquats. Limequats. Ponytail palms that were six feet tall…
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Phoenix Gardening Reality: Intense Sunlight, Heat & Shade (Day 5)
“The moon shines bright.” -Shakespeare, “As You Like It” That may be an exaggeration, but we are definitely talking about a bright place. Phoenix is hot. When we talk to people from the Northeast anytime between mid-March and October, the question is: “How hot is it out there?” We all know it’s hot. From a…
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Desert Gardening in Phoenix: What Seeds Teach Us (Day 4)
Before we took off for Phoenix, I got books. I like books. If I’m going to garden in Phoenix, of course I’ll need to read books about how to do it. Gain knowledge. Ha. Hahahaha. We arrived in April and I did try. But no matter how much I had read, I could not make…
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My Phoenix Garden: Light, Walls, and Orientation (Day 3)
As a former engineer, I always start with a floor plan (in theory) – or a site plan. So today is about giving you the lay of the land – the shape of the little world that has become home. Phoenix gardens differ from northern ones in many ways, but the most striking is the…
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Meet Humphrey: Chief Inspector of My Phoenix Garden (Day 2)
One of my favorite British TV shows of all time is Death in Paradise. So when we decided it was finally the right moment in our lives for our first dog, we knew he’d be Humphrey. We just didn’t know who Humphrey was yet. After loads of research and searching for breeders, we found the…