Welcome! Lots of astute observations in there. Takes a long time to learn these lessons in one's own garden.

My favorite is how TV and mags make laying flagstone and pavers look so easy. They just pull them off the stack and plop them down in their neatly prepared sandbed and your done!! What they don't show you is all of the prep work that is needed to get to the laying step, which is so crucial for success.

I agree. There's a lot of information out there, including other gardens nearby and professional gardens for businesses. Gardens can be a personal reflection. They should be 'yours'.
Cheers,
Peggy

It is amazing to me how many different sizes (height and width) are given for the same plant. All the miss information like needing a certain plant to pollinate the plant you just bought if you want to have the incredible berries that sold you on the plant in the first place. It is just like everything else, to many choices and not enough information to help make a decision.
Ally

While I can understand the confusion, especially to those who are not experienced gardeners, the information IS out there. Different sizes are often given because plants grow differently under different growing conditions and everyone's garden offers slightly different conditions from the next. And unlike humans, most plants don't suddenly stop growing once they've achieved maturity - they will continue to grow until they die, although growth can sometimes slow to almost imperceptable rates. And I'm not sure I understand why needing a pollenizer to produce berries or other fruit is considered misinformation - it is what it is, a fact of plant life :-)

One of the things that appeals to so many about gardening is that, in addition to being a process of renewal and regeneration and therefore without a clear end, it is also a constant learning process. One can never have too much knowledge and the nurturing of a garden over the years will inevitably increase the gardener's knowledge base if only by observation, if not otherwise motivated by the need to research formally. Often that passion for research accompanies the passion for gardening - I don't know too many serious gardeners that don't buy almost as many books about gardening and plants as they do plants themselves.

Thank you for the welcome. I've lurked a long time and been a rare respondant to posts but this was my first all my own post.

You realize that my DH calls it my "quest" as maybe I AM getting a little obsessive about trying to design this yard better. I love to learn new stuff. I still plant my veggies -- what would summer be without fresh tomatoes! -- but I now have better privacy on my big corner lot. I'm geting better winter interest and less maintenance. (Ditch the beds of annuals. Mulch is my friend. Antique roses look hideous by August. Some plants deserve to be round-up ready or shovel pruned)

I was just a bit frustrated in my "quest". Oh, I do not have a split level but what do you do with those darn low windows anyway?

Maria

Don't ditch the annuals, just ditch the beds of nothing but annuals.

Maria,

I'm a garden blogger (I don't sell anything). There are many other garden bloggers out there and some are professionals, but most are not. There's so much information (with lots of photos) available in these online resources that are based upon experience -- trial and error, lessons learned, what works, what doesn't -- in flower gardening. Many of us try to post a blog article everyday during the season. There are garden bloggers all over the world.

From my blog, I have a list of Gardening Gurus that have blogs associated with magazines. I have a lot of links to blogs of amateur gardeners. I have World Gardening News articles on live feeds. I have YouTube videos associated with gardening.

Anyway, there are some "real-world" resources out there from real gardeners who love to share info. Yes, the tastes vary and some won't be of interest or appealing. However, there's a lot of information out there from which to choose and it's all for free because bloggers write because of their passion for gardening and hope to get a small bit of gardening funds from ads, not from readers.

Hope this is helpful.
Cameron

Here is a link that might be useful: Defining Your Home Garden blog

You may be reading the wrong magazines. :-) I like the occasional Better Homes & Gardens article for its "garden porn" quality, but Sunset and Fine Gardening are both 100 times better at giving you a good idea of how all the pieces of the property fit together and form a whole. They often have full, if not very detailed, plans for the properties they feature, rather than just having a bed with all the plants in that bed. They also discuss the reasons behind many of the design choices--such as site orientation, lifestyle, screening needs, etc.

I've enjoyed any number of landscaping textbooks, as well. These tend, these days, to be heavy on the modernist aesthetic, but there are still very solid design principles presented. My faves are those that focus on contrasts--this doesn't work and why, versus this that does and why. Most of these are focussed on commercial/public spaces, but the same principles apply.

You should also pay attention to what you like, PERSONALLY, about a space. I happen to LOVE height in my freestanding beds. I want beds that go from 1' or less to at LEAST 5'--or if it's a hell strip or something similar where "low" is generally preferred, I like it to 3'. I love shady places. Most rose gardens bore me to tears. I like stolen views and garden rooms. I dislike looking across five sun-bleached beds at a glance. I like hidden corners. I love variations in color in foliage--a great emerald green "wash" with gold and purple against it, or purple and blue. (Not so fond of gold and blue....) I like plants with strong shapes and attractive foliage--or that are easily hidden by those with the attributes when they stop blooming! I love grasses and shrubs, bulbs and large-leafed plants, and compact conifers. In colors, I like many combinations, but I'm not fond of yellow, going more toward variations on a main combination from the red/pink/coral/orange palette with accents of purple (foliage, mostly, but some blooms)--in fall ornamental cabbage under Japanese maples against a brilliant green backdrop are stunning to me. So I know what works for me, personally, and what doesn't. This lets me make good aesthetic choices once I've figured out the bare bones of my project--other than just saying I like plant A and plant B, so I'll have them both, just 'cuz. The fact that I personally like plants *together* more than plants apart makes it a lot easier for me. I'm not swayed by the collector/true *gardener* compulsion to have lots of different plants that I like individually. I care more about how they'll look as a group. I like trees first, shrubs next, then perennials, and finally annuals (especially coleus and elephant ears, though flowers, too!) for adding bulk and color where it's needed temporarily.

Other people have very, very different tastes than I do. Plenty think that orange/purple contrasts are ugly and prefer complimentary colors. That's fine by me. Others adore low, sun-washed beds, and many thing a rose garden is next to heaven. Or they love drifts of annuals. That's great, but it's unimportant for me figuring out what *I* like!

There are a couple garden blogs out there that I peruse. I do like Fine Gardening. Garden Design is definately for as my mother used to put it "people with more money than sense". The most useful design books I ahve found are a BH&G book from like 1961 (hmm same year I was born) and a text book from the land grant university within driving range.

I have definite likes and dislikes. I went through a whole antique roses phase. I'm geting more into shrubs. I still do annuals but in more measured doses. I have to meld my tastes with the spouse's and let the kids have their own gardens evn if I end up maintaining them. Or not as the case may be.

Thanks to all with their thoughts and encouragement. I guess I was also in a frustrated mode re recent post about gardening as a depressing pastime. Its an adventure. I know I will be an enthusiatic hobbyist and never in the same league some of the posters here. Hey, my haiku is pretty bad too.

In the middle of a massive computer conversion at work so I may not be back for a while. thanks everybody. Its a good thing its coming up on winter 'cause I won't doing any real gardening any time soon. Winter in the midwest is for planning anyway. Thanks everybody.

Maria

See, I have the opposite problem. There's TOO MUCH out there for me. Too many plants, too many trees, too many ideas about what's right and wrong in design - the thing I am lacking is the time and the ability to take it all in and synthesize it and cast off what I don't need and keep what I do need. Some days I feel I'm banging my head against the wall. Others I feel a swell of pride when I see something I've planted actually working out well.

Some days I feel like a wee tree being blown over by the north wind - I came here so y'call can be my strategically placed stake when I need one! :-)

Gardening is a dangerous hobby for the obsessive-compulsive!

:-)

I've come to realize that gardening is a lot like interior decorating: it all becomes much simpler when you have a theme. What makes it uniquely satisfying is to find the theme that you absolutely love. For me in the garden it's "Mediterranean cottage garden featuring antique roses". Unlike Maria, my climate allows me to grow (mainly) tea roses, noisettes and Chinas that bloom ten months of the year. As someone mentioned above, rose gardens can be supremely boring, so companion plants are very important as a supporting cast. When we began gardening on our hillside property there were five plots of grass, a few trees and native vegetation and boulders. The five plots of grass and some of the surrounding areas are now filled with roses, lavender, irises, rosemary, cypresses, butterfly bushes, crape myrtles, junipers, lantanas, carnations and day lilies. It's informal and natural looking, so that it fits in with the surrounding wild countryside and yet it's flowery and friendly, and now home to lizards, bees, birds, toads, frogs and other wildlife. I don't spray anything and use only organic fertilizer. Does it always look great? No. Is it always better than what was here before? YES! There's excitement and life and the thrill of seeing a new rose flower (I have 82)and watching the whole garden picture mature and evolve. It's also the deep satisfaction of feeling a part of nature, rather than being in conflict with it. (Strangely enough the many bunnies we have rarely touch the things I've planted) although they do love the compost pile under the tree in the back of the house where I dispose of kitchen scraps.)

Some of the planting designs I've devised have been only partially successful and some not at all. Fortunately, it can all be fixed and you learn in the process. Reality and pictures in magazines are two different things, but fortunately your friends' and neighbors' gardens don't quite measure up either. The carrot of perfection is always dangling out there and the fun is the process of reaching it, all the while knowing that the fun would stop if you ever did.

Ingrid