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PAS Garden Home: The 12 Principles

It’s a new season of P. Allen Smith’s Garden Home!  This season we are getting back to the basics.  We’ll review the 12 principles of design that transform an ordinary yard into a garden home.  The winter landscape at the Garden Home Retreat serves as our guide for illustrating these principles.

Friends in the Garden
Peter Thevenot is an expert at growing and training espalier trees.  He visits the Garden Home Retreat to check on the espaliered fruit trees and offers some tips on keeping them in shape.  

Construction Update
The steps leading up to the cottage front porch at the Garden Home Retreat are made from local limestone.  The porch is painted gray to reflect the color of the limestone.  Gray is also a traditional porch color.  We used Benjamin Moore Cliffside Grey.

The Green Component
April Ambrose is what you might call a green expert.  Her mission is to educate people in her community about environmental awareness.  In this interview she explains how to the phrase “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” to work in simple ways.

Garden Home Inside and Out
Shutter expert Rick Skidmore explains how to select the right shutters for a house.  He says the most common mistake people make is mismatching the scale of the shutters and the windows.  Even if they will never be closed, it should appear that they could be closed and cover the window properly.

Garden Home How To
Wisteria Allee
Wisteria is trained into a tree shape by selecting a central trunk and systematically removing side shoots and suckers. 

Mowing Techniques
Lawn care expert Michael Ballou explains how to mow your grass properly.  Read more. 

Virtual Makeover
The owners of this 1935 house in North Carolina have finished up remodeling the interior and now they are ready to get started on the landscape.