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.

The New York Times has imaginative photo composites and a detailed article about the future gardens that the city and Friends of The High Line will build on a nearly a mile-and-a-half long, elevated railway in Manhattan. The project is a fascinating mix of old and new, reuse and repurposing. With native plants mingling with hybrids for year-round color and art installations to catch entertain walkers in Chelsea Market, the space looks like a garden designer’s dream.

With more businesses moving overseas leaving aging factories behind, perhaps this is the future of public gardens in urban areas. Unused, but historically significant, commercial structures won’t be destroyed to make way for greenspace; they will be refashioned into gardens that protect both history and the future.

The gardening life Web site features all sorts of sweet gardening inspiration. From curb appeal projects (including a contemporary Craftsman garden) to an encyclopedia of seasonal living, gardening life has tons of garden pictures that offer great ideas for landscape design and outdoor entertaining.

I have fallen in love with a landscape designer. (I hope my husband doesn’t mind!) Derek Fell designs romantic gardens and photographs the great gardens of the world. I had a chance to see his garden design sensibilities up close when I stayed at Mirbeau Inn & Spa last July. Just recently, I discovered Derek Fell’s Garden Photo Library, which catalogs his work. You can browse over 150,000 garden photos at no charge. The photos are also available to download for private use (as reference or prints) for only $10 each.

Dark flowers, especially the ones closest to black, held a special place for folks in the Victorian era. Today, these deep-toned posies have come back into style, with many gardeners creating entire gardens devoted to black or near-black blooms. This dark trend suits the upcoming Halloween holiday perfectly, so I thought I would share some dark flower resources with you in case you want to use dark blooms to decorate, or want to add them to the “must-have” list for your garden.

• Domino magazine offers a Dark Flowers slide show that shows off how to decorate with deep-colored blooms. The short photo set includes the flower names, so you can add them to your list of dark flowers to plant in next year’s garden.
• The USA Weekend article, “Add mystery to your garden with black flowers,” features a brief, but helpful list of black flowers.
• Andy Sturgeon writes about the relationship between Halloween and black flowers in “Black Flowers – Spooky!” over at BackyardGardener.com.

[photo Before the Storm German Bearded Iris - Jung Quality Seeds]

My plant budget didn’t include bulbs this year, but here are a few of my favorite suppliers for tulips, daffodils, crocuses, hyacinths and other fall-planted bulbs:

• Van Dyck’s Flower Bulbs and Perennials – A great all-around source for a ton of different bulbs. They even have giant purple alliums, which I have yet to try.
• Old House Gardens – These folks search abandoned homesteads to find sturdy, classic bulbs. I love gardening with heirloom plants because they have proven to be more disease resistant and hardy than most hybrids.
• Brent and Becky’s Bulbs – I love the sheer variety that this couple offers. Since they are in the South, they have pre-cooled bulbs and many flowers that northerners can’t overwinter.

When we moved to this old schoolhouse in the country, I inherited a blank-slate. A few mature pine trees dotted the yard, a couple of lilacs sat by the back deck and a bunch of peonies languished by the back stoop, but that was it. The earth seemed to be waiting for someone to dig in, and I happily obliged.

We’ve toyed with the idea of moving for the past couple of years (to look for better jobs, to get better edumacated, and to maybe get a zone ahead), but I always feel the garden pulling me back. While this is our second home, I feel as though I’m coming into my gardening-own here. And I just can’t stand to see what happened to my last garden happen in this place where I have toiled so hard.

Oh, I merely dabbled in gardening at our first place, plopping in narrow rock gardens on both sides of the front walk, stuffing in a few shade-lovers under the gigantic crabapple tree in the backyard and attempting to coax veggies to grow in the one patch of sunlight. We decided to move on to something a little bigger (because 480-square-feet for two dogs, four cats and a couple of humans felt a little cramped), and were happy to sell the place fairly quickly to a young guy just starting out after college. A few weeks after the sale, I drove by to see how the plants I left behind were doing. To my horror, all of them were mowed down and the rocks had simply been thrown to the side.

Still, I know there may come a time when we need to leave this place. I’m hoping we find someone to buy this house who is like the woman in the story I just read over at the Minneapolis Star Tribune. (“Inheriting a garden” – You may need to register to read it, but it’s worth the minute it takes.) She not only walked through the garden with the former owner (taking notes that she abandoned soon after because there was just too much information), she has also started making the garden her own by adding the flowers she loves.

With the amount of house hopping that has happened over the past few years, I’m sure there has been an increased number of inherited gardens. If you find yourself inheriting a garden, this brief article from Heritage Perennials has a few tips on dealing with your new plot. It’s best to get an idea from the former owner about how much maintenance they did, what plants are where, and what chores they did when, if you can. And remember, don’t be afraid to make an inherited garden your own. Just keep the lawn mower off the plants, okay?