When The Only Bay is…

If you aren’t lucky enough to be near a bay of water on this first sizzling day of July, consider the next best thing. It’s one of our all-time favorites to use for structure plantings. The Sweet Bay Magnolia is a mid-size flowering ornamental tree with beautiful structure but that’s not the only reason to ponder this specimen. Its fragrant bloom makes it literally the ‘sweetest’ Magnolia around. While other specimen Magnolias will grow larger in size, the Sweet Bay is this ‘just right’ proportion for the smaller, more intimate garden spaces and its extra bonus is that giant surprise of scent.

We often take a Sweet Bay blossom to remind a client about that tactile experience of scent, touch, not just its visual presence, which brings me to another design note.  Our blog and our social media sites are going to receive a branding facelift. While it’s always fun to get an outside marketing perspective, we certainly won’t be losing our unique garden and design voice. In our world, authenticity equals trust and you can’t build solid relationships if you are missing either one. Plus it’s too darn hard to fake loving what you do. It should naturally boil over into your daily soup. For us, it’s that constant contact with our own garden and our love for the outdoors and nature that work as inspiration to create unique landscape designs.

And don’t forget when the only Bay around is Sweet Bay, it’s the perfect mid-size flowering ornamental tree that covers a lot of sensory ground. Enjoy your holiday week ahead and over the next few months, look for our new facelift but with the same voice.

©Images by Ann Bilowz

If you like this blog, hope you check in for your daily share's worth of inspiration, design, and garden tips; always original, not cookie cutter and copied. Just like our design work, we strive for unique! Like our Facebook follow on Twitter or subscribe to the blog to receive posts daily via email or a feed. Either way, we hope you follow the postings somewhere in cyberspace and share it with your gardening friends. Contact me direct at Annie You can follow with visuals on Pinterest and find us on LinkedIn and Houzz, too. Don’t forget Google+ where you can find us under Ann Bilowz and Bilowz Associates Inc.

Trees on Tuesday

If you need a #trend for Tuesday, let’s draw our attention to something bigger and better than what’s trending in the airwaves. Let’s go all out and get to the crux of what makes or breaks a great planting, which often includes large nursery stock.

Visiting a nursery to look at trees might still be on your outdoor backburner, but to get you focused, here’s a rerun form March 2011 to remind you that Trees-R-Us. If you click on the link, it’s a few of our tree picks and a reminder to get first dibs on the best of the best specimen trees. Plus, it keeps in theme with yesterday’s topic, which if you missed it, here it is again. And as an added bonus, another favorite to the Trees-R-Us list – it’s one that makes it into most of our plantings. Why? Because everyone falls in love with it – it’s the Sweet Bay Magnolia.

The fragrance of a Sweet Bay Magnolia is the number one reason to plant this rare native. Depending on form, in the plant world it can be considered a large shrub (15-20 ft.) or an ornamental tree. In mild winters it can hold onto some of its leaves, making it a quasi semi-evergreen. Its glory though is its bloom cycle. The intoxicating fragrance of one blossom in a saucer of water can overwhelm a room; superior to any of those fake plug-in air fresheners.

Its perfect location is adjacent to a terrace or outside a window where everyone hangs out. You can plant its understory with medium to low-growing shrubs, herbaceous perennials and groundcovers, adding to this spectacular garden moment.

As Marion Woodman once said, “The longing for sweets is really a yearning for love or sweetness.” The Sweet Bay Magnolia is the perfect icing on the cake, especially after a long, cold winter.

Above excerpt on Sweet Bay Magnolia from our archived post, Have a Sweet Bay of a Day.

© Image by Greg Bilowz - Sweet Bay Magnolia Blossom 

Above excerpt on Sweet Bay Magnolia from our archived post, Have a Sweet Bay of a Day.

If you like this blog, hope you check in for your daily share's worth of inspiration, design, and garden tips; always original, not cookie cutter and copied. Just like our design work, we strive for unique! Like our Facebook follow on Twitter or subscribe to the blog to receive posts daily via email or a feed. Either way, we hope you follow the postings somewhere in cyberspace and share it with your gardening friends. Contact me direct at Annie You can follow with visuals on Pinterest and find us on LinkedIn and Houzz, too. Don’t forget Google+ where you can find us under Ann Bilowz and Bilowz Associates Inc.