PAM BECK GARDENS

This lecture recommends some of the best landscape plants that are sure to thrive in the Old North State for both new gardeners and newly transplanted gardeners. Many of these plants will be old familiar friends, and a large number are native plants, but none will be invasive or too difficult to grow successfully.

It is time to reevaluate your landscape and your relationship with it. Let's plan sustainable urban landscapes filled with healthy plants. Working with a holistic approach, we can create realistic gardens that are maintainable, water-wise, nature-friendly, and food-producing. This inspirational lecture is filled with practical suggestions to take home to your own outdoor habitat.

This lecture will illustrate colorful successful combinations of perennials for everything from sunny sites to shady niches. How to choose interesting plants for texture, color, and leaf shape will be covered as well as some hints for those personal touches that really make a garden.

Whether you have a tiny lot to landscape or simply wish to make a large garden more manageable, your design challenges include creating the illusion of spaciousness while still maintaining privacy. This instructive lecture explores how to make the most of your intimate landscape through carefully chosen hardscape and plant material, tricks of perspective, and a bevy of fresh design ideas.

Various vines and climbers add height, flower, and foliage interest throughout the landscape in a unique way, by traveling vertically. Vines lift the eye, frame entrances, soften edges, and enhance ordinary buildings. This popular lecture will encourage you to climb to new heights while embellishing your own "de-vine" garden.

If you don't already have a shade garden, you soon will as your trees and shrubs spread and grow. This colorful talk examines all of the layers of a shade garden with recommendations for plants that can tolerate various types of shade and root competition, along with design tricks to brighten up even the darkest corners.

With apologies to both Frankie Valli and Antonio Vivaldi, this lecture isn’t about music, in the traditional sense. It is about creating a harmonious landscape that is beautiful, sustainable, and enjoyable throughout the year. Experience all four seasons in this PowerPoint lecture with beautiful imagery and choice plants to tempt you to create your own year-round landscape.

A mixed border containing deciduous and evergreen trees, ornamental grass, shrubs, vines, and decorative touches has distinct advantages over a simple herbaceous planting bed. First, you can add year round excitement introducing height, various textures, and colors that carry your garden through the entire four seasons. Second, the woody plants may cut some of the time and labor involved in caring for a perennial bed. This lecture with Pam's photographs is filled with ideas to embellish your own home landscape's mixed borders.

Movement through and around the landscape is dictated by the paths and passageways, barriers and borders, objects of interest, outstanding specimen plants, water features, etc. that together create unforgettable garden rooms. This PowerPoint lecture will show you how to incorporate some of these tricks of landscape design to help your garden flow.

This entertaining talk is a colorful travelogue of the outstanding public and private gardens of North Carolina, with occasional introductions to the talented people behind their creation. Beginning at the sandy coast, we will hopscotch up, down, and across the Old North State, peeking into gardens of all types, until we wind up our journey in the high mountains. If you love North Carolina, you will really enjoy this lecture.

Attractive landscaping integrating your home's style into the site with appropriate plantings and colors is a goal for all of us, but often making your mark in the garden means adding those personal touches like sculpture, plaques, unique hardscaping, out buildings, and other flights of fancy. This PowerPoint lecture is sure to tickle your funny bone and encourage you to create an out-going garden.

Many of the plants mentioned in the Old and New Testament are surprisingly hardy and suitable to be grown in our public and private Southeastern landscapes. This entertaining inter-denominational PowerPoint lecture full of Biblical references, art, history and folklore is frequently requested by both social and religious groups desiring a deeper understanding of the plants of the scriptures, or for planning a Biblical garden of their own.

Your garden can delight the senses all winter long with careful planning incorporating evergreen foliage, fragrance, jewel-tone berries, captivating textures, and colorful wintertime flowers. This popular lecture with inspiring photographs will illustrate how to enhance your garden's allure throughout the coldest months by exploring various possibilities for extending the excitement in your landscape from the first frosts of fall into late spring.

As the days warm and lengthen during spring, drab winter landscapes give way to the riot of spring bulbs, awakening grassy lawns, beloved small decorative trees, and blooming shrubs. New shades of green, white, purple, pink and gold burst onto the scene in our gardens. This is a time of transition we anxiously anticipate all winter long, especially after attending this lecture!