Design tips for country gardeners

If you have a large property and are looking for country garden design tips, I have lots of information and ideas at my website.

Here are several links to give you landscaping and planting ideas: I often get questions about how we designed our garden and how we maintain it, so I have put together these country garden tips.

At my site I have more design tips for large-scale country landscaping.

Country planting schemes force you to think big and that’s great because you can use lots of big plants in larger groupings. Learn more with these country garden planting tips.

One of my favorite parts of our property is our meadow. Here’s how we got the meadow established.

Our country property story: To tell the truth when we started out, I was just looking for a house with a bigger yard. But my husband, John wanted acreage, and if I know anything about John, it’s that he thrives on challenge.

It took a year of searching to find a suitable property, just outside Hamilton. Spring 1998 found us settling for a weedy 10 acres (4 hectares), with a very basic, but liveable bungalow. The property had been a rental for years, and what wasn’t a rough hayfield was a tangle of burdock, buckthorn, poison ivy, thistles and rusted farm detritus.

Most of our friends thought we were crazy, but we knew that the good points far outweighed the bad. We liked the fact that the house was set far from the road with a terrific view of a golf course and sprawling horse ranch right opposite. And because the grounds were neglected, the property was a bargain.

We moved in at the end of May and spent that first summer in cleanup and bulldozer mode. There was no question of planting anything until we’d primed the canvas. John and I removed endless weeds and brambles, collapsed fences and tons of concrete from the site of the original barn, long since torn down. By living with the property for season, we came up with a design plan that we implemented over half a dozen years.