Gardenista

6 days ago | gardenista.com | Marie Viljoen

Well before summer hits its often-humid stride, three enchanting spring phlox species offer months of flowers, from the beginning of that budding season through early summer. Woodland phlox, creeping phlox, and moss phlox are distinct spring phlox species that offer bursts of color in tricky places. They precede (by months) the more stately garden phlox—tall and showy in late summer and early fall, but often prone to mildew in muggy climates.

1 week ago | gardenista.com | Margot Guralnick

Like many freelancers, Sandy Suffield’s work schedule ranges from round-the-clock to nothing doing. During lulls, the London-based art director and set designer is self-occupying in all sorts of astonishing ways. Her biggest project? Purchasing a derelict turn-of-the-20th century electrical building in the Suffolk countryside, two hours northeast of London, and resurrecting it as The Engine House: A Modernist’s Dream Vacation Rental.

1 week ago | gardenista.com | Michelle Slatalla

Tiny bistro tables and and compact chairs are eminently more practical for outdoors than big hulking monster pieces, because you can easily carry them from patio to lawn and back, to follow the sun. And if you don’t have much room? Even the smallest sliver of a balcony will try to accommodate a table for two.

1 week ago | gardenista.com | Marie Viljoen

The sunbirds of Cape Town are to the local flowers (and humans) what hummingbirds are in the Americas: Small, bright, enchanting, and impossibly photogenic, but less impossible to photograph (thankfully, sunbirds perch to feed on nectar, rather than hovering, like their American counterparts). A sunbird safari is my only-slightly-tongue-in-cheek answer to the great safari quest of so many tourists in South Africa. The only people who say they are going on safari are tourists.

2 weeks ago | gardenista.com | Kendra Wilson

“With a show like this, you have an opportunity to be experimental,” says furniture maker Sebastian Cox of the pavilion he made with Je Ahn, of Studio Weave, for the Tom Massey-designed Avanade Intelligence Garden. The brief from Avanade and Microsoft, the show garden’s sponsors, was to highlight the benefits of using AI for improving the survival rate of urban trees, one third of which don’t live past their first year, and half of which will last only 10 years.