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Landscape Design & Maintenance

Here in the Midwest, with its frigid days and frequent snowstorms, the winter months are the perfect time to immerse yourself in nature. No, you can’t head to the garden to putter, but you can curl up with a good book  --  or a magazine  -- or a blog -- or even a stack of seed catalogs to expand your horizons, learn something new and get your nature fix. 

I’m always searching for something new to dig into and through the years, recommendations from friends and from professionals in the field have led me to some outstanding reads. This year I asked the staff at Embassy Landscape Group to share some of their wintertime favorites. 

Not surprisingly, they’ve suggested some great choices.

One of the problems with winter garden maintenance is that many best practices are often dependent on location, weather conditions and plant species. While this makes it difficult to provide hard and fast rules for everyone, there are a few wintertime maintenance dos and don’ts that hold true regardless of where you live.  To help the newer gardeners this winter, we’ve put together a short list of some important winter 

There’s a unique fashion show going on right now at the Village at Briarcliff Shopping Center In Kansas City, Missouri that you might not want to miss. It’s a bit different from your usual fashion show  --  there is no admission fee, it’s staged outdoors, you can see it any time of day or night and the models are not your typical fashion icons.

Creating winter planters can seem like a daunting task to those of us who are not design gifted by nature. Luckily, there are some basic principles that can help the most non-creative of us put together a spectacular outdoor display that ushers in the holidays and with just a few minor adjustments now and then can bring cheer to the long winter months.

The color of a  winter garden is never going to rival the boundless vibrancy of spring and summer or even the mellow richness of fall gardens. However, adding splashes of vivid colors to the winter landscape can help lift your spirits and energize your life just when you need it most. 

By Sandra Nelson  

So you’ve been considering adding a water feature to your backyard, but haven’t quite decided if it’s the right decision for you. Having enjoyed ponds and streams, waterfalls and fountains in my yards for decades, I can give you lots of reasons why adding water to the landscape is a great …

  By Sandra Nelson  

July 1959 was an exciting time for my family; It was the year that my father made his mark on our neighborhood. He became a local celebrity by turning our backyard into what was then considered a lavish outdoor living space. Fired up by pictures he saw in magazines, my …

By Sandra Nelson  

In the last few years I have come to understand how important it is to make my garden inviting for pollinators such as bees and butterflies. Pollination by bees help support the four crops that make up 90% of the world’s food production while butterflies also act as pollinators and are …