Lois de Vries' Garden Views

Enjoy a virtual tour of one of our collaborator’s gardens Why use the Sustainable Gardening Library’s Featured Garden App? Most public gardens can’t be thoroughly explored or appreciated in a single day. You can use our virtual tour to map out your visit before you leave home, or use it while you’re there to prioritize which features you want to see first. Or, just take a virtual tour of one of our finest gardens from your easy chair on a rainy afternoon.  The Sustainable Gardening Library is device-responsive, meaning that the software detects what platform you’re using to access it and renders the library in the format that is most appropriate for your device (desktop, laptop, tablet, or phone). These directions are for accessing our Library via desktop, laptop, or tablet. What Is the Sustainable Gardening Library Featured Garden? This section of the Sustainable Gardening Library provides a virtual tour of one of our collaborating institutions’ gardens. The Featur...

How to find out who’s doing forward-thinking work in sustainable gardening and farming near you. Have you ever wondered whether a public garden, town, or university near you was working to make their landscape or campus more sustainable? Or, whether they had a demonstration garden you could check out for ideas? We did, too. And as our family of content collaborators grows, we’re adding their stories to a special section of the Sustainable Gardening Library. Search the Library by Sustainable Gardening Organization This section of the Sustainable Gardening Library provides a more detailed description of all of our collaborating institutions, maps their locations including contact information, and provides a master list with links to everything they’ve posted in our Library. How to use the Sustainable Gardening Library Organizations app 1. Click on the Organization button on the Library’s Home Page. 2.  Click on a map pin,  or   hover your cursor over the radio butto...

We’ve put everything in one place so when you want to grow flowers and food, or create outdoor living spaces in more Earth-friendly ways, you don’t have to spend hours searching all over the web to find what you need.  Check us out at https://sgi-gardenlibrary.maps.arcgis.com/home/index.html  

How to take your gardening project to the next level Stormwater Basin, Pequannock Township. Photo courtesy of Joe Golden, Township Engineer. See Sustainable Gardening Library Topics app for Eagle Scout project that led community engagement. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a gardening newbie raising three houseplants on a studio apartment window sill, or a municipal engineer overseeing the installation of a stormwater detention basin; we can all kick our sustainability factor up a notch. Everything you need, all in one place If you want to become a better steward of our planet’s resources through how you grow plants, you’ll love The Sustainable Gardening Library Topics app. We collect the latest tips and resources from public gardens, universities, and government agencies nationwide and put everything in one place so you don’t have to spend hours searching all over the web to find what you need. Search the Library by Sustainable Gardening Topic This is the heart of ...

Check it out https://sgi-gardenlibrary.maps.arcgis.com/home/index.html People ask me that all of the time. I like to think of it as the go-to resource for sustainable gardening information. We include farming and landscaping practices, too. We’re putting everything in one place so people who want to grow flowers and food, or create outdoor living spaces in more Earth-friendly ways, don’t have to spend hours searching all over the web to find what they need. But it isn’t what most people think of as a traditional library. How the Sustainable Gardening Library is the same as a specialized public library: It’s free. Anyone can use it. It’s organized by categories. It’s a library devoted to a single specialty: Sustainable gardening and farming. It hosts a variety of materials: Documents, spreadsheets, images, videos, and links to materials on our content providers’ websites.   How the Sustainable Gardening Library is different from a public library: It’s a digi...

Happy Earth Day from all of us at the Sustainable Gardening Library!  Please garden and farm responsibly, because we can’t get there without you.

Just in time to help us escape the winter doldrums, writer-director Vivienne De Courcy’s gardener-centric, romantic adventure story, Dare To Be Wild, has been released on all on-demand platforms including iTunes Movies, Comcast Xfinity, Amazon Video, Sony PlayStation, and many more.  The film traces the uplifting true story of Irish landscape designer Mary Reynolds’ “hero’s journey,” from ripped-off celebrity go-fer to youngest-ever Gold Medal winner in London’s fabled Chelsea Flower Show. For garden geeks like me, this is just the ticket for injecting some much-welcomed color and inspiration into an otherwise grey winter. And for eco-freaks like me, who hope to weave people back into the web of life, the film holds out the promise that there’s a way to touch the souls of those who have become disconnected from the natural world by “making wild nature fashionable.” In her directorial debut, De Courcy focuses on the importance of humanity’s place in Nature. She hopes, she...