Girl power: an all-female gardening team shares secrets for keeping plantings beautiful year-round - Garden and Outdoor Living

Sunset, Nov, 2003 by Debra Lee Baldwin

Sisters Brenda Gousha and Barbara McFadden founded their landscaping business six years ago with the mission to create and maintain flower gardens in Southern California's Rancho Santa Fe area. Gousha, who has a degree in ornamental horticulture, and McFadden, a Master Gardener, pooled their talents to select their clients' plants, position them, and keep the beds and borders looking beautiful. They called their business Sisters Specialty Gardens.

Making the rounds of high-end homes is nothing new to the sisters; as kids, they tagged along with their father, who cofounded San Diego's Weir Bros Custom Homes. As demand for Gousha and McFadden's services increased, they sought additional help, recruiting Patrice Longmire, an honorary sister with a great eye for floral design.

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Most of their clients want year-round flower color, lush greenery, and no bare spots or dead blooms. Such perfection takes time, effort, and gardening savvy, so it's not surprising that the women learned to streamline their techniques for garden design and maintenance. Follow their guidelines in your own garden and you can't go wrong.

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Design tips for gardeners

Use perennials as backbones, annuals as fillers. Sisters Specialty Gardens uses flowering shrubs and perennials as mainstays in beds and borders, filling in around them with annuals for quick and easy color. The pathway pictured on the previous page, for example, is accented by flowering shrubs such as Westringia fruticosa 'Morning Light' and deep purple butterfly bush (Buddleja davidii). There are also white 'Iceberg' roses, penstemons (P.x gloxinioides), and dwarf Agapanthus 'Peter Pan'. Annual nemesias in white, pink, and blue border the path, where they can be easily reached and swapped out. "Annuals bloom for six months and can be replaced at minimal cost," Gousha explains. Low, mounding chamomile and creeping thymes grow between the nemesias.

Choose easy-care plants wherever possible. For the hot, dry slope pictured above, Sisters mixes tough, unthirsty perennials, mostly in purples, pinks, and grays. Among them: Armeria maritima, with globular pink flowers; Artemisia 'Powis Castle', with silvery foliage; purple bearded iris; lavender (Lavandula dentata, L. x intermedia); pride of Madeira (Echium candicans), with blue-purple flower spikes; salvias; Santa Barbara daisy (Erigeron karvinskianus), with white, daisylike flowers; Santolina chamaecyparissus, with yellow, buttonlike blooms; society garlic (Tulbaghia violacea), with pale lavenderpink blooms; and yarrow (Achillea millefolium). Horizontal pathways and rock walls help hold the slope.

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Tuck in flowers for cutting. To bring the beauty of the garden indoors, Sisters finds places to add cutting flowers for use in bouquets. Against a trellis beside a driveway in one garden, the women planted sweet peas that bloom from mid-January or early February into May, depending on the weather. "In spring, we harvest often," Longmire says. "The more you pick and deadhead, the longer the plants produce flowers." McFadden adds: "A simple jar or white earthenware pitcher is perfect for displaying them." Sisters starts sweet peas in midfall, sowing seeds about 2 inches apart in well-prepared soil.

Plant seasonal color in pots. To brighten entries and soften hardscapes such as patios and poolsides, the women fill pots and bowls with annuals twice a year: in October for fall through spring color, and in May for summer color.

They combine two or three different types of plants per pot ("Less is more," Gousha says). Johnny jump-ups, pansies, and violas in shades of purple and violet might fill pots during the cool season. In May, they're replaced with warm-season bloomers such as white African daisies (Osteospermum Symphony Series), lavender bacopa, pale pink geraniums, hot pink million bells (Calibrachoa hybrids), and blue and white nemesias.

Before planting, Sisters fills pots with four parts potting soil to one part worm castings (available at nurseries). To achieve fullness fast, they pack the pots with plants--a flat of 4-inch annuals (16 plants total) for a 2-foot-diameter pot, for instance. Plants get water as needed (about once a week in winter, twice weekly in summer) and are fed every two weeks with liquid fertilizer.

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Cover bare soil. Nothing makes a planting look unfinished or immature like bare soil around it. Sisters lays lime-colored Scotch moss (Sagina subulata) over the soil beneath potted topiaries or other plants in containers (such as the violas pictured above). A blanket of moss lends a weathered, Old World appeal to pots. Use a knife to cut pieces of moss from nursery flats, trimming them to fit your container. Moss needs regular watering and occasional feeding with liquid fertilizer.

Sisters Specialty Gardens: (760) 473-0234.

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Groom plants often. When cutting back perennials and annuals to clear sidewalks or paths, trim the plants at a 45[degrees] angle (cutting downward toward the path's edge), rather than perpendicular to the ground. "It looks better," Longmire says.