Everyone loves a good show (and sale). You will find one at the Cathedral Antiques Show beginning with the opening of the Inspiration House and Gardens January 22, 2012 continuing into the Cathedral Antiques Show opening night February 1. I always pick up a special treasure or two at the sale. A little Wm. Spratling silver bell I found 10 years ago has lead to an entire collection of Spratling’s work. This year the antiques include some special mid century pieces for all you Modern design mavens.
Gardens to Love will be showing our work and products at the Inspiration House Showhouse on the campus of St. Phillip Cathedral where we are renovating the front gardens to update the foundation plantings and entrance terrace for a fresh approach. It is just the kind of thing we do all the time for our clients—update, redesign, and refresh. This time of year we all feel the need for it! Come see us at the showhouse or drop us a note any time; our very own design mavens will be happy to bring something new and refreshing to your gardens and terraces
After a long searing and stressful summer we’re looking for something fresh, flowering, and affordable. In my opinion, nothing offers more value than pansies. Planted October thru November they are in flower from the day they are planted until the heat of May closes them down.
If you are overwhelmed with the color choices and face patterns or stuck at trying to decide whether to add violas, poppies, snapdragons, kales, euphorbias, and the like to the pansy beds and pots send us an email or give us a call. Hugh Brownlee, our lead horticulturist has been making these choices for clients for almost 20 years. Sarah Price, our associate landscape designer, is also a painter and looks forward to deciding the color and texture options for clients’ winter color borders planted with pansies and more.
Although I have been planting pansies professionally for over 35 years I still get excited when I see and smell thousands of flats in bloom in growers’ greenhouses. Yes, thousands of flats! Everyone loves a pocketful of pansies.
Marcia Weber
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Posted in Fall, Winter
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We absolutely love Southern Living!
Smart irrigation month is an industry campaign to increase public awareness of the value of water use efficiency. One way to conserve water is to practice efficient irrigation. We all know not to water in the middle of the day or every day of the week. That practice disappeared as soon as citations were issued by the water department when they found a house with sprinklers running after 10 am. There are additional important items to think about when you practice efficient irrigation. Consider having old conventional spray heads replaced with rotary nozzles. By releasing water at a slower rate, rotary nozzles can reduce over watering and run off. Fluctuating water pressure can cause over use or even under use of water. If that is a problem at your house, the installation of a pressure regulator at the valve is a good idea.
An evolving and maturing landscape with trees that offer more shade or newly planted shrubbery and flower beds can impact irrigation systems. Some situations call for moving heads completely to avoid sprays being blocked by new plantings. Or areas may no longer need irrigation at all because the plants have rooted in deeply and are now well established in place. Low volume drip lines may be best for the new shrubbery bed. These changes in your irrigation system save not only water but also money. The new technology in efficient and water saving irrigation parts and systems is exciting to me and I am happy to talk about it with you. Creating a healthy beautiful garden, while conserving water, is the right thing to do.
June is a beautiful month. Magnolias and gardenias are blooming and filling the air with what for me is the scent of the south. Being in the garden in June is a wonderful thing with the borders of perennials starting to bloom and shrubbery becoming more lush with each warm night. To make the whole scene look pulled together rather than falling apart, you will need a June prune.
This pruning is done to remove excessive spring growth, that’s the floppy stuff that gets in the way of other less aggressive plants. It is done to give the right amount of separation among plant groups. And structural pruning reveals good plant form. All of this work should be done with a well trained hand and an eye that sees three dimensionally. Not everyone has these abilities; our team of professional pruners here at Marcia Weber Gardens to Love was born with them.
It is time for a June Prune and Kevin and Alex are ready to come to your garden, pruners in hand.
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Posted in Gardens to Love
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Marcia in the June issue of Atlanta Homes & Lifestyles. Turn to page 72 for a closer look!
If your garden has room for just one more flower, let it be an old rose.
Atlanta gardens seem to be busting out into every square inch with flowering trees, azaleas, more azaleas, and early summer annuals. Atlanta and it’s gardens are in full bower as I write this note.
The first flush of roses has begun also, and if you don’t have at least one rose you need to get one. Here at the office garden, Hugh Brownlee, our resident rosarian has tucked in a Climbing Don Juan that somewhat camouflages the chain link fence but certainly fills the front office with vases of heavily scented flowers. The flowers and the plant are tough as the chain link fence they are planted upon. At the HVAC unit he stuck in a rootless twig of the old tea rose, Maman Cochet. A year later we have a large yet very dainty bush covered with elegant sweet flowers in a beautiful salmon color. This plant is growing in a difficult spot with plenty of shade yet it is thriving. Belinda’s Dream and Escapade have begun to bloom in the planter outside my office window. I will have the joy of looking at the unending parade of clear pink double and single blossom roses from now until hard frost on both of those plants. Belinda’s Dream makes great cut flowers for our desks. Hugh seldom has time to do more than smell the scent and admire the form of these roses yet they grow, bloom, and offer delight for months and months.
If you have room for one more plant, let us know. Hugh will pick the right rose for the right spot and he will work with it to produce the romance of a rose.
Marcia Weber
Belinda’s Dream Rose
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Posted in Gardens to Love, Spring
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We’re pleased to announce that we are featured in the April issue of Southern Living. Southern Living is my favorite magazine to flip through by the pool, read snuggled up on the sofa, and pull out recipes to try. It is such an honor to have an article in this month’s edition. The article is attached below and it demonstrates the advantages of a well designed retaining wall and added backyard space. We are very excited about this issue of Southern Living—more so than usual! Make sure you pick up a copy today!
The leaves on the oak trees are the size of a mouse’s ear. That is nature’s signal to plant early summer vegetables. Seeds of my French filet beans went in the ground Saturday as the oak trees were bursting into leaf. I also planted Baby ball Boro beets and Nantes carrots. All three will be ready to pick in only 55 days. Lettuce seeds get sprinkled here and there whenever I find a few inches for quick growing leaf lettuce. There are a couple of very small patches of earth here at the offices of Marcia Weber Gardens to Love yet they are planted with enough mixed vegetables to supply us with fresh vegetables of some sort year round. I squeeze things into a very small space by using lots of compost, organic fertilizer and a small four tined fork.
It is really never to late too early or too late to start planting vegetables. It all depends on the kind and variety. Just bend at the waist and put the seeds in the ground. You can’t have vegetables until you do that.
Marcia Weber
It’s a rainy Tuesday morning in March and still I can’t help but think how much I love this time of year. The weather is perfect—temperatures are in the upper sixties, pollen has not yet arrived in full force, and the grass is turning green. One of my favorite parts of living in the south (other than nice manners and collegiate football) is that we are lucky enough to have distinct seasons. Usually spring in Atlanta is our shortest season with summer quickly replacing winter, but this year we have been able to enjoy temperate weather and the abundance of new life that is associated with this time of year. Although the official first day of spring is not until next Sunday, it’s already spring to me. I see many trees, shrubs, and flowers that are about to burst with color and new growth. I hope that you all are spending plenty of time outdoors enjoying this wonderful time of the year.
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Posted in Spring
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Everyone loves a good show (and sale). You will find one at the Cathedral Antiques Show beginning with the opening of the Inspiration House and Gardens January 22, 2012 continuing into the Cathedral Antiques Show opening night February 1. I always pick up a special treasure or two at the sale. A little Wm. Spratling silver bell I found 10 years ago has lead to an entire collection of Spratling’s work. This year the antiques include some special mid century pieces for all you Modern design mavens.
