Home Improvement Support

I converted my yard to native plants last fall. All the fragrant and evergreen sumacs are dying off one by one; they have never thrived. I ensure they get a good soaking at least once a week. I was warned not to fertilize them or it will make them deer fodder. They are placed as understory for our live oaks and mulched with a couple inches of oak leaf/hardwood mulch. What can I do to save the few that are left?

Can we assume that the sumacs were planted when you did your conversion to native plants? If so, they have not been in the ground very long and could still be suffering from transplant shock.

Read all post…

Tuscon-based architect Rick Joy grew up in Maine, where he studied music and worked as a carpenter before going to architecture school at the University of Arizona. Joy has earned a reputation as a master of desert rammed-earth construction (Steven Holl calls his work “transcendent moments of space, light, and matter” in Rick Joy: Desert Works). For this project in the Green Mountains of Vermont, Joy departed from his usual vocabulary and created a gable-roofed, steel-framed cedar-shingle-and-stone house and barn. The traditional “stone-ender walls” are made from bedrock salvaged from the bottom of Lake Champlain, engineered by Olde World Masonry.

Read all post…

If only Mattie Fancher could arrange the modern world the way she has arranged her garden – well-ordered, lovingly tended, and subject to nature’s sensible time-table rather than the impossibly fast-paced, technology-driven world that controls us today.

The 105-year-old Austin resident enjoys a garden that offers a restorative sensory experience; it unfurls across her emerald yard, a patchwork of multicolored delights planted in curving beds, arranged so delightfully that visitors are obliged to meander – not rush – through the half-acre space , taking in the brilliant hues, breathing in the agreeable scents and soaking up the serene tranquility she has devotedly cultivated in the middle of a “congested, hurried, push-button” city.

Gardening, Fancher says, is one antidote for a frenzied world.

Although she is generally long on stories about life’s joys and short on complaints, there is this: “Schools took out their teaching on nature,” she says.

Read all post…