In this post, I'll be showing you alternatives to the traditional grassy lawn. I hope that these landscaping ideas that will open your eyes to ways you can design a grass-free front yard landscape. Of course, many of these landscaping ideas for your yard translate to backyard landscapes as well.

A restricted planting palette is an effective garden design strategy. Here are 3 reasons to consider limiting yourself like this when creating your garden.

Successful planting design focuses combining plants based shape, foliage color and and texture while ensuring that selected plant also want the same growing conditions.

The secret to creating successful plant combinations in your garden borders lies in paying attention to these five traits.

When selecting plants for small garden design, it pays to be demanding. Plants that occupy a large area need to deliver more than a small plant occupying in small spot in the garden. I call this the "Goodness Ratio."

Strongly contrasting foliage color creates energetic, invigorating plant combinations while the use of a limited color palette tends to yield a more quiet and restful garden vibe. Get planting combination ideas to add verve and jazz to your garden beds or soothe your soul with a restful scene. What are you in the mood for today?

Even though my drawings eventually get translated to a digital medium once I recreate them on my iPad, but there’s something about actual, physical pencil-to-paper that's still the fastest and most freeing for me. I’ve created a series of short videos that capture this sketching technique in real time—warts and all!

In this post, I demonstrate how to lay out three different gardens, using the same four plants to fit three differently-shaped but quite typical garden beds:

In this video, I create two versions of the same landscape using plants for sun in one and plants for shade in the other. The gardens are designed with shape, form, texture and color top of mind.

Carefully selected plants are the secret to creating a memorable garden. These tips will help you choose plants like a professional landscape designer.

When it comes to garden design and plant selection, there's a huge number of enticing and beautiful plants to choose from, and that can make it hard to decide where to start. Narrowing the selection from the many choices can be a challenge. I hope this framework for thinking about it will help.

Repetition is a core principal of landscape design. Repeating plants is a tried and true strategy for creating continuity and cohesion in landscape design. These are some of my go-to plants for creating rhythm and repetition.

Even a common, ubiquitous plant can be elevated by its association with a complementary partner — just like two musicians, each player adds perfectly-timed contributions of foliage, flower, fragrance, or other pleasing attribute, and the song is made.