How has rewilding become such a prickly issue? | Letters

Readers respond to a piece by Isabella Tree which advocates abandoning perfection

To add to Isabella Tree’s article (Don’t be scared of rewilding, Monty Don and Alan Titchmarsh: it’s a garden revelation, 24 July), may I refer Monty Don and Alan Titchmarsh to the 1985 book by Chris Baines, How to Make a Wildlife Garden? They will learn from this, and from Tree’s article, what a wild gardener really is.

We concentrate on improving habitats for wildlife, so we nurture everything from piles of leaves to swift boxes, ponds to hedges, climbing plants to dry walls. We may leave fruit on our bushes, stands of nettle by our ponds, ivy on our shrubs and trees. We will be as busy as conventional gardeners in autumn, cutting back, taking cuttings, clearing paths. But we will pile up our leaves, or use them as mulch.

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* This article was originally published here

Letting in the light in a Finnish artist’s home

Colour and pattern vie for attention in a cheerful bungalow in Lapua

Ten years ago, when Laura Annala was house-hunting in her hometown of Lapua, southwest Finland, there was one property that kept resurfacing. “It was a detached, yellow-brick bungalow built in the 1980s,” Annala recalls. “It had low ceilings so it wasn’t very bright inside and the rooms were either painted brown or covered in flowery wallpaper. It was really uninspiring.” For two months, she scrolled past the listing until one day her father decided to get on his bicycle and take a closer look.

He found the house was surrounded by a mature garden, thick with flowers and trees. The location was also ideal – it was opposite the local school and Annala and her husband, Jussi, were hoping soon to start a family. It was also “really cheap”, which meant they would have enough money left over to renovate the tired interiors. At the time, Annala, a hair stylist, was starting her own business. She had spent the previous decade living in Helsinki, Tampere and the Netherlands, where she had met Jussi. Now, she was hoping to open her own salon in Lapua. A budget-friendly, three-bedroom bungalow started to make sense.

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* This article was originally published here

BEFORE AND AFTER KITCHEN AND LAUNDRY ROOM

I know...I have gotten so lazy about blogging....I think of all these things I want to talk about and then I get distracted and well...I am sure we all know how that goes down! Anyway I posted a reel on Instagram and someone said the pictures move too quickly so I thought I would put some of them on a post!  I can be nice like that:) This was a fun project as I was working with Ladisic Fine

* This article was originally published here

A sustainable house built to blend into the Brazilian jungle

It began as a garden in the mountains, but this artists’ home evolved into a retreat designed to disappear from view, hidden by plants

The Villa Mandaçaia project has changed dramatically over time. It began as a vegetable garden, created for the hundreds of plant species that the artist João Machado – a botanist in his spare time – used to collect as a hobby. João, who is also the son of the famous Brazilian painter Juarez Machado, grew up amid the canvases and brushes of his father’s workshop in Paris and in the lavender and sunflower fields of southern France. During other vacations, he would visit Brazil and, eventually, decided to buy a piece of land in the mountains and establish a garden with more than 400 of the plant species he’d collected from around the world.

When he found this sunny piece of land, bisected by a river, at an altitude of more than 1,000m in Visconde de Mauá, a village in the Serra da Mantiqueira – between Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais and São Paulo – he wasted no time: this was the ideal place to put his dream of seeing his garden bloom into practice. “I started by spreading the seedlings and positioning my sculptures, designing an organic path,” he says.

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* This article was originally published here

HGTV is making our homes boring and us sad, one study says

A pair of professors found that HGTV and other home renovation media lead homeowners to decorate for the masses, not for their own happiness.

* This article was originally published here

How to build the backyard frog pond you didn’t know you needed

Making space for frogs supports local biodiversity and can provide natural insect control for your property.

* This article was originally published here

Prairie planting takes root in UK as gardeners battle drought and floods

Creator of winning garden at Hampton Court flower show says US plants are ideal for changing climate

Years of hot dry summers parching lawns and killing off prize blooms have caused many gardeners to switch to using gravel and Mediterranean herbs, trees and shrubs.

But a newly fashionable style of planting known as prairie planting could be a way to maintain a lush garden that is good for wildlife, while withstanding drought and floods.

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* This article was originally published here

* This article was originally published here

Prairie planting takes root in UK as gardeners battle drought and floods

Creator of winning garden at Hampton Court flower show says US plants are ideal for changing climate

Years of hot dry summers parching lawns and killing off prize blooms have caused many gardeners to switch to using gravel and Mediterranean herbs, trees and shrubs.

But a newly fashionable style of planting known as prairie planting could be a way to maintain a lush garden that is good for wildlife, while withstanding drought and floods.

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* This article was originally published here

My law-breaking mission to save Britain’s endangered orchids

Ben Jacob looks back on his lifelong passion for Britain’s native orchids, and reveals why he has risked heavy fines and even prison to save them

A garden centre. The soft artificial light of neon bulbs. Aisles hung with gloves, plastic bottles, plant food. Houseplants perched on white tables. Maybe not a place conventionally thought to change a life, but it changed mine. Not the bottles or gloves, but one of those houseplants. There it was in a plastic pot in the company of a few others, long, dark-green, strap-like leaves fountaining around columns of big star-shaped blooms that seemed to have been fashioned out of ruby, opal, citrine. The moment I saw it everything else lost focus. Those flowers held me spellbound. The plant was an orchid, a Cymbidium originally native to parts of Asia, propagated to feed a lucrative market in tropical orchids. I didn’t know that at the time. I was nine. I had been interested in nature – birds, mammals, David Attenborough documentaries – for a long time, but that exotic bloom was a league apart. It held me entranced. My parents were kind enough to buy it for me (I think they liked it, too) and my first orchid sat on the landing, its flowers slowly dying. The challenge was to make it flower again.

I saved up pocket money earned from washing my dad’s car to purchase a book called Essentials of Orchid Care (or something like that). As this was in the days before the internet, getting hold of that book required convincing my parents that we needed a return trip to the garden centre, which (oh, what a coincidence) might also afford me the opportunity to feast my eyes on other orchids. As they are keen gardeners, this was not a challenge. Alas, they did not agree that the first Cymbidium deserved a companion, but I could buy the book.

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* This article was originally published here

‘There’s an Elvis room and a Barbie room and a Disney room’: inside California’s quirkiest homes

An all-pink palace, a dominatrix’s lair and the former home of a Hollywood legend – residents on the draw of living in the Sunshine State

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* This article was originally published here