gardening
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Week 8: Don’t Do It Stop Ordering Plants Now!
Why summer gardening in Phoenix requires discipline, humor, and occasionally leaving your house without your dog. Truth be told, I am the last one who should be writing this post. I should be reading it. How do I write about something I am clearly determined to learn the hard way? Be warned: this is not…
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Week 7: Planting a Jacaranda in Phoenix — Meet Jackie, My Baby Tree
As I may have said once or thirty times, shade is priceless here. The desert has no mercy at noon, and few plants can take the sun at its strongest. Even among the famous saguaro cactus, the seedlings that tend to survive are the ones that grow in the shade of a “host” tree. I…
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Planting Princess Kate: My First Clematis texensis in the Phoenix Heat (Week 6)
I’m finding that even though I can’t grow many of the species I see on BBC’s Gardener’s World, I’m still enjoying watching. I pick up small, practical things — a better way to deadhead, a reminder about pruning timing — the kind of universal advice that translates across climates. But I also love the home‑garden…
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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…