"Learn how to spend fewer hours and less money on revamping the garden." -The English Garden The prospect of revamping your yard can be daunting. Where do you start? How do all the areas come together in a beautiful, cohesive way? In The Beginner's Guide to Starting a Garden, Sally Roth simplifies the process by showing you how to spend fewer hours (and a minimal amount of money) in the garden by tackling one small area at a time. You'll find garden plans for ten unique areas-the entryway, the shady areas under trees, and more-that can be linked together over time to create a unified yard, and plants that are dependable, easy to find, and look good year after year. You'll also learn the basics of good design, which plants offer the most bloom for your buck, and how to avoid the most common planting mistakes. The Beginner's Guide to Starting a Garden: 326 Fast, Easy, Affordable Ways to Transform Your Yard One Project at a Time simplifies the garden design process by showing you how to tackle one small area at a time. Sally Roth is an award-winning author of more than 20 popular books about gardening, nature, and birds, including the best-selling Backyard Bird Feeder's Bible. Roth is also a contributing editor for Birds & Blooms magazine. She and her husband share their home in the high Rockies with a variety of animals. You can visit her website at sallyroth.com. Introduction: A Lifetime of Learning I learned how to garden at my mother's knee-literally. "I'm going outside for a while," she'd announce, and I'd follow along, hurrying to get my little red wagon, so I could help haul plants or weeds or rocks. Her gardens were gorgeous. And ever changing, as she transplanted things a few inches left or right, or all the way across the yard. I can still see her standing back, squinting, to check the look of what she was creating. "Needs more yellow, right there," she'd say, pointing. Then she'd reach for the shovel to move a blooming clump of coreopsis daisies then and there. Every year, her flower beds got bigger, and the lawn got smaller. Meanwhile, I absorbed the art of gardening, and the how-tos of transplanting, dividing, and otherwise making more of a good thing. Garden centers were almost unheard of back then, so Mom got most of her plants from friends and neighbors. Oh, you could send away for plants through the mail, but that cost money, and Mom was a penny-pincher. Having gone through the Great Depression, she never took money for granted. Sixty years later, I still remember which precious plants she had sent away for, because those words became part of their name: "The smokebush I sent away for." "The 'Peace' rose I sent away for." "The climbing 'Don Juan' [rose] I sent away for." That was the grand total, until I grew up and visiting the garden centers and nurseries then springing up all over became a weekly outing for Mom and me. Every summer, my mom broke off a spray of her beloved smokebush to put in the old white ironstone pitcher. "Smell," she'd urge me. "Doesn't it smell good?" I can still conjure the distinctive scent. Some plants were growing around the hundred-year-old house when my parents bought it in the 1930s, like peonies, old "lemon lily" daylilies (Hemerocallis flava), lily-of-the-valley, and a few pink "live forever" sedums. And Mom made more of those plants, as well as plants she'd received from friends, saving seeds, slicing off starts, and rooting cuttings. She managed to plant our whole acre with lush gardens that probably cost her a total of $100 over the decades. My mom was a big fan of native plants, which were called wildflowers in her day. All natives are beautiful, but some are too understated to stand out. Black-eyed Susans, here with native blue California phacelia (Phacelia tanacetifolia), make a conspicuous s

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