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Garden Terms: Trellis, Arbor and Pergola

Garden design has a vocabulary all it's own and even though many of these terms are quite common, we often confuse them.  I've tried my best...

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Designing Your Garden: The Preliminary Design
Spatial design is a wonderful way to define your garden spaces and determine planting bed locations. Luckily there is a process to lead us through...
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Designing Your Garden: Defining Structure
This can be the most challenging, yet the most fun part of developing your spatial design. Once you create a bubble diagram to organize your...
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Designing Your Garden: Bubble Diagrams
Designing your landscape can often feel overwhelming. The best place to start is with a bubble (or functional) diagram.  This is wonderful way...
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Three Ways to Love Your Garden Before Spring Arrives

Once the holidays end in December, it seems that January and February can dwell on as we yearn for spring to arrive. To add a bright light to these...

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Quick Tips for Rendering a Plant Symbol in Marker

I've been wanting to do a proper marker rendering tutorial for awhile, but haven't carved out the time, so thought I'd share a quick sketch I did...

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15 Gardens in One Afternoon

This past week I had the wonderful opportunity to attend the Association of Professional Landscape Designers (APLD) annual conference in Orlando,...

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Stippling a Lawn

Stippling is an art technique that uses small dots to create a larger image. In this case, I'm using stippling to add extra character and...

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Drawing Ground Textures

I'm a pen and ink artist to heart so love adding textures to the ground plane in my landscape plans. Yes, they take a little time, but add such...

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An Itty Bitty Allium

A few weeks ago I wrote a post on my favorite summer blooming alliums; Allium 'summer beauty' and Allium 'millenium'. Now I'd like to share my...

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Pen Options for Line Weights

After posting my line weight graphic several of you asked about the types of pens I used, so I made a new graphic below that shows some of my...

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Line Weights for Landscape Plans

Proper line weights give your drawing depth and clarity.  Few line weights will make your drawing feel flat, while a variety, used in the...

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Summer's Surprising Polka Dots: Alliums

Polka dots are sweet and dainty, while being a great companion to other bold patterns. Yes, the polka dots in my garden are sweet, but they are...

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Simple Lettering for Landscape Plans

Each year when I teach hand lettering in my landscape graphics class ultimately someone says "I can't do this. My printing is too messy."  I...

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The Black Border

While visiting Reiman Gardens in Ames, Iowa, I had the pleasure of stumbling across one of their annual displays, the black border. It is a lovely,...

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The Pop-Up Garden: Creating Garden Rooms

When you walk through a fabulous garden, do you ever wonder why you're so intrigued with it? Maybe its because that garden was...

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Sizing an Outdoor Patio

Every year this question ultimately comes up in my landscape design studio: "How large should I make a patio for a certain number of people?" I...

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Planting Design Tips
Though I officially learned planting design in college, I didn't begin my real education until I began creating my own garden. These are...
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