Planning and Design

The USDA Plant Database website offers more than 40,000 photos to help you identify plants in your state, learn about endangered plants and find invasive plants and noxious weeds. Find out more about this great resource for gardeners.

Sprucing up out front pays off: landscaping improvements are one of the top five home improvements recommended to sellers by real estate professionals. Even if you’re not putting your house on the market, a few smart touches will up your curb appeal and make your house a nicer place to come home to.

Side yards are often skinny and neglected spots in the garden. Here are some ideas to turn a side yard into welcoming garden space

Check out the new lineup of flowering shrubs debuting in garden centers and nurseries this year, including reblooming hydrangeas and weigelas and a native wisteria.

Most yards have at least a few tight areas between buildings, sidewalks and houses. For narrow-space gardening, here’s a selection of skinny plants for skinny spaces.

One of the nicest finishing touches to landscape improvement is lighting. There are several methods to providing an accent to a night-time garden.

Learn how to add focal points to turn a dull landscape into an eye-grabbing work of natural art, even if you are not a landscape designer.

Preen gives you a wide variety of ideas to put together a color palette for your garden. Learn and apply these tips and let your garden’s true colors show.

Gardens — and the way people grow them — are constantly changing. Here’s a look at what horticulturists, growers, researchers, and garden trend-watchers think will be the hot gardening trends in the next few years.

A picturesque landscape doesn’t have to be an investment involving landscapers, contractors and a wholesale overhaul. It’s possible to breathe new life into a sad landscape with just a few high-impact, modestly-priced changes. Consider these eight possibilities.