16 Smart Gardening Tips and Tricks

Every January, Martha dives into a stack of seed and plant catalogs to find unusual cultivars and species to grow next. "For me, gardening is all about scent, color, and variety, variety, and more variety," she says. Instead of ordering just one type of baptisia, for instance, she'll choose several to try out new colors and test cultivars to see how they fare. In her flower garden, which is inspired by Turkey Hill's, she fills the beds with dozens of kinds of roses, irises, dianthus, phlox, columbines, and self-seeding poppies, which have "the nicest way of popping up in unexpected places," she says.