10 great garden ideas _ The Chicago Tribune photo gallery isn’t fancy, but it shows a bunch of do-it-yourself garden designs.

Garden is a seedbed for green cosmetics – A hand-tended, German garden provides the raw ingredients for an eco-conscious line of cosmetics touted by Hollywood-types as the bestest make-up evah. Interestingly, the company started focusing on herbal remedies.

Organic garden uses every sustainable trick – This eco-savvy garden shows how sustainable, organic gardening can look fit so seemlessly into conventional landscaped neighborhoods that you would never know it’s “green.”

Back to the garden – Author Michael Pollan suggests we all dig up our yards and garden not just for pleasure, but to sustain us in the “calamity to come.” He believes growing our own food we will make a bigger impact on slowing our destruction of the planet than the smaller things we are already trying.

The incredible, edible front lawn – Through the Edible Estates project, the Rodriguez family received a grant to plant a front-yard garden to feed their entire neighborhood. This is an amazing concept, and I really hope someone will create a foundation to help more people convert their lawns to vegetable gardens.

Fruit tree gardening is a, ahem, growing trend (a 2006 National Gardening Association survey found that fruit tree sales had increased 26% in the past year). Raising your own fruit can be an easy, satisfying foray into gardening, with compact, disease-resistant trees offering even postage-stamp-sized-garden city dwellers a chance to eat a ripe peach or plum straight from the tree.

You still have time to pop a tree into the ground before winter takes hold. But, which type should you plant? First-time fruit growers might do best with trees that resist the most common varietal diseases. They should also look for fruit that doesn’t attract a lot of competition from animals. Perhaps the easiest fruit tree to start with is a variety of apple, since it offers both of these things, along with a versatile fruit.

Here are some resources to get you started on your fruit-tree growing way:

• Backyard Orchard Culture: Growing Fruit Trees in Limited Space
• Planting Fruit Trees in the Fall
• Varieties of Apples: Selecting Varieties of Apple Trees to Grow
• Training & Pruning Fruit Trees
• Fall Care of Fruit Trees

I’m starting a new feature called Quick Links, where I’ll gather a few links about a topic for your reference. First up is edible landscaping, a great choice for folks with little space who would like to have plants that provide more than just pretty flowers or foliage.

• Design and Maintaining Your Edible Landscape Naturally by Robert Kourik – I’ve added this book to my Wish List because it looks as though it has a lot of information about designing your own edible landscape, including comparisons of different plant varieties and color pictures of example landscapes.
• Edible Landscaping and Gardening by Ben Sharvy – Speaking of plant varieties, Ben Sharvy has an excellent list of suggested edible plants which includes pictures and descriptions. I like that he included perennial herbs in the mix, since that’s my main focus right now.
• How to Landscape with Edible Plants by Marion Owen – Marion Owen offers excellent design tips for edible landscaping, including suggesting using a fruit-bearing shrub as a hedge rather than the typical privet and replacing dead or dying trees with a fruiting variety.