As our seasons get wetter, proper drainage for your property becomes a serious issue. We like to think that new challenges create new opportunities. Here's 5 ways to create a beautiful solution through landscape design.

Construction crews try their best, but damage to trees, shrubs and garden beds during a major (or even minor) renovation is inevitable.  Here are 4 preventative measures you can take to minimize any damage.

Most of us understand that a sophisticated landscape design substantially improves our day to day enjoyment of home and property, but it also yields a high return on our investment. Let’s take a look at a few current statistics…

Scientists use the absence or presence of the monarch butterfly to measure the health of our ecosystem: both adult and larval stages are highly sensitive to pesticides, climate change and loss of habitat. Here’s what can you do to help.

Pruning shrubs and ornamental trees can be the most puzzling garden task– not just for new gardeners– but alarmingly, for a good number of lawn care workers, too.

The sparse snow covering this month reveals the dull browns and grays of winter gardens. With a bountiful variety of native evergreens, your landscape need not look bare.

With the warmest October and December on record, Westchester and Connecticut are experiencing temperatures more in line with early spring than early winter. So what does this mean for your garden?

At the end of the summer, with beds full of worn out perennials and annuals, sad but resolute gardeners often bid farewell to their color-filled gardens and turn their attention to the fall clean-up. The talk turns to the beautiful autumnal leaves, while inwardly gardeners sulk as they scan the vast expanses of mulch in their formally bountiful flowerbeds. With a little planning and some knowledge of the many magnificent but often less popular plants, gardening can easily become a four season affair. 

You get a fresh perspective. Your garden designer is a trained professional who works with you to create your dream landscape, tailored to the way you use your property, whether you want a backyard ball field or a comfy entertainment space.

As we age, we grow taller and wider (hopefully not too much!). So do our plants. Proper selection, placement and regular pruning are essential for keeping plants the size and shape we want them. If you buy a house and the previous owners never pruned their shrubs, these plants have probably outgrown their welcome. See Does your Garden Have Balls? Shrubs that grow 30’, like yews and hollies, can sometimes be renovated, but they will look like sad sticks for many years.

With just a few small changes, you can enrich your garden and help support the native Westchester ecosystem that depends on it.

Spring bulbs are opening this week in beautiful clumps or drifts of thousands. These crocus, tulips, daffodils and hyacinth will be blooming until the early summer. It's too late to have these in your garden this season but here’s the plan for next season: plan now, order in the summer and plant them in the fall.

Gardeners have been conditioning their soil with sphagnum peat moss for years, unknowingly contributing to carbon emissions by depleting some of the planet’s great carbon sinks. The peat bogs across the world do more to take carbon out of the air than the tropical rainforests. And they are being harvested at an unsustainable rate.

Is every shrub on your property sheared into a sphere? Or perhaps several different shrubs are cropped into one undulating sculpture, resembling an Antoni Gaudi creation.

If your potted plants are looking a little sorry right now — wilting, new growth shriveling or a general lack of unhappiness — it could be short winter days or dry heat. Or it might be minuscule troublemakers: spider mites. These tiny creatures, less than a millimeter in size, are not easily seen. The best way to check for them is to examine the plant in a sunny window or a strong backlight. If you see fine webbing, especially in the crotches of the stems or on new growth, it’s a sure sign your plant is under attack. The mites suck on the plant sap, causing stilted new growth and deformed leaves. Infested plants will start to turn brown. If left unchecked, mites could destroy a whole houseplant.

When it comes to pest control, often the best thing to do is... nothing.

It’s a common feeling to go into attack mode when your landscape is being chomped on. A client told me, “I buy organic fruit for my family, try not to keep anything in plastic because of the chemicals it leaches, but when I saw my shrubs being devoured by insects, I was ready to get out the DDT!”

It’s practically a ritual in Westchester. Spread fertilizer on the lawn in the spring and fall, maybe even twice more during the summer, so it stays a bright green. Add limestone to keep the soil alkaline, to increase nutrient uptake. Apply a pre-emergent to control the weeds. Spray Roundup and pesticides when needed.

Salt is bad for your health. It turns out that salt is bad for gardens, too. Every time rock salt is used to melt ice on a road or walkway, it damages nearby vegetation in two ways.

For those of us who can't wait for Spring (uh…everyone…?), we've compiled a garden checklist to help combat winter blues, indoors and out.

I recently went back to visit my old Queens neighborhood. I had fond memories of walking to school through a tunnel of maple-lined streets. But the place was hardly recognizable. No trees had been planted to replace the old, majestic giants, now gone. The street looked naked and harsh. I see the same thing happening to our neighborhood. Like Queens, Larchmont and Mamaroneck's development soared in the 1920?s. Most of the tree stock planted by the original developers is, if not already dead, at life's end. You need only to look at the picture above to see what a difference street trees make.

Trees surround us, mute and towering. Most people know very little about how to buy, plant or care for them. So I have elected myself tree spokesperson with this primer on the care of trees.

Winter was brutal in terms of tree damage. Shaking the snow off my shrubs helped somewhat, but the tree branches are too high up. Winter winds and old age take their toll on trees.

Most trees will survive lost limbs. The key is not to leave a ragged edge, which is harder to heal. It's better to make a clean cut. This will allow the tree to grow over the wound and compartmentalize it.