Carmen Johnston: Bringing a Game Plan into the Garden

John Pyle | Design: Better Homes & Gardens

The Better Buy, a podcast from Better Homes & Gardens, explores all things home—from decorating and DIY to renovating and budgeting. For season 2, we’ll delve into the full home buying process, from house hunting and moving to interior design and landscaping, with stories, practical tips, and advice from our guests each week. We’re on a mission to inspire and empower you to create your dream home. New episodes every Wednesday!

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Host Mélanie Berliet talks with garden and landscaping expert Carmen Johnston—the owner of Carmen Johnston Gardens and Bespoke Garden Plans—about easy ways to spruce up your front yard, her best advice for beginner gardeners, how to avoid common landscaping mishaps, and why gardening, like cooking, can require quite a bit of patience.

Carmen Johnston is a pro gardener and landscaper who owns Carmen Johnston Gardens, a landscape design and installation firm based out of Georgia, and Bespoke Garden Plans, which provides personalized digital landscape design plans for clients across the country. She is HGTV’s Smart Home 2023 landscape expert, and her work has appeared in magazines like Southern Living and Country Living.

Carmen shares her best methods for embarking on large scale landscaping projects—without taking on too much stress.

Start with the landscape plan, and number two, break it down into phases. Don’t think that you have to do everything all at one time. I think a lot of people get so overwhelmed because they see the front yard, the backyard, there’s so many things to tackle in a garden … Just take it one season at a time.

There’s a lot of things that you