Even if you don't own your home, you can have a wonderful garden of your own. Renters don't have as many options as homeowners might, but they can still have a lot of fun.

No matter where you live, a well-cared-for garden sets a good example for the neighborhood, and most landlords are delighted to have tenants interested in keeping the place spruced up and attractive. But is it OK to dig holes in a yard you don't own? Before you grab a spade, you should probably have a conversation with your landlord.

For this conversation, a quick garden plan -- or even pictures from magazines -- might be very compelling. Let the landlord know your plan to make the most of what is already there. If your rental property has trees on it, don't propose a sunny garden that would require major tree work (and would introduce the question of who should do the job or pay for it). Plan a shade garden, instead, with hostas and other shade-loving plants in pots or in the ground. In sunny gardens, there are lots of easy plants for your rental garden paradise. Reblooming day lilies are one good choice. They're easy to grow, and they bloom off and on all summer: The small plants you set out this year will double in size -- and in the number of blooms -- by next year. If you move, you can divide the plants, leaving some as your horticultural legacy to the next tenant.

Flowerpots and planters are the renter's natural allies. A pot on the front porch adds a cheerful note and doesn't require digging. Pots can be planted with cheerful annual flowers, or you could try shrubs in pots. A potted rose or hydrangea will look beautiful the moment you finish planting, and these shrubs are easy to take care of. For extra color, you could find space for a six-pack of annual flowers around the edge of the pot. Simple plantings, with just one or two plants in a pot, aren't a compromise; they're streamlined and stylish.

When you're designing your rental property garden, think of the garden spaces as you would a comfortable room in the house. You need a place to sit, a table, some lighting, and perhaps some colorful accents. If you can, invest in great garden furniture. You can take it with you, and it will look good wherever you go. A pleasing coffee table can be put together with a large, beautiful fieldstone raised on cinder blocks. The raw materials are available at building and garden supply stores.

Being outside in the evening is one of the great pleasures of a garden, and lighting the garden is a snap with classic bistro lights. The lights can be strung along the eaves, wound around tree limbs or hung on a trellis or an arbor from a garden shop. Support the structure with patio blocks (available at builder's supply stores) or in big flowerpots filled with cement.

Habitat for Humanity's ReStores sell gently used building materials and accessories, and you never know what you'll find when you stop by. If you keep an eye on your local ReStore, you might find kitchen counters or cupboards with the potential to serve as a potting station, an outdoor kitchen or a backyard bar. An old door makes a great tabletop. A pair of shutters, given a fresh coat of paint, has all kinds of potential: Use them to make handy shelves, or put several shutters together to create a privacy screen. If you need inspiration, borrow ideas from Pinterest and make them your own. Salvaged materials can lend great style and comfort to an otherwise uninspired garden space.

Embrace the space. Plant it with flowers and vegetables, either in the ground or in pots, and give it style with great-looking furniture and subtle lighting. We all may be moving on someday, but that's no reason to postpone having a good time outside in a pretty garden setting right now.

(For editorial questions, please contact Clint Hooker at chooker@amuniversal.com.)

Roses no longer receive a free pass through the garden gate: Instead of accepting lovely roses despite their many faults, gardeners now expect them to earn their place in the garden.

The famous roses of the last century -- Peace, Mr. Lincoln, Queen Elizabeth and dozens of others -- produced beautiful flowers on gangly plants that required a strict regimen of fertilizer, pesticides, pruning and pampering. "Times have changed," says Jeff Epping, horticulture director at Olbrich Botanical Gardens in Madison, Wisconsin. Time-consuming, chemically dependent old-time roses aren't really welcome any more. "It's bad for the environment, and it's bad for us," Epping says. "We have to ask ourselves if it is really worth it, when there are so many other great plants out there."

Fortunately, new pest- and disease-resistant shrub roses are stepping up to fill the gap. Shrub roses are not an official category, but an informal designation for hardy, healthy roses that flourish in real-life garden conditions. These reliable, repeat-blooming roses aren't prima donnas, but versatile plants that look their best in mixed flower beds among other flowering shrubs and annual and perennial flowers.

Shrub roses tend to produce clusters of flowers, not long-stemmed florist-style blooms, and they have considerably more impact than a garden full of roses on sticks. Knock Out and other roses in the Knock Out family (Blushing Knock Out, Pink Knock Out and four others) are the best-known of the bunch, but hybridizers have introduced many other lines of shrub roses, including Easy Elegance, Oso Easy and Drift roses.

"Shrubs play an important role in gardens," says Natalia Hamill, brand manager for Bailey Nurseries in Minnesota, which introduced the Easy Elegance line of shrub roses. "They give a garden definition, structure, height and color, interest and texture -- and they are easy to grow." Consumers who have given up on traditional roses are coming back around to give shrub roses a try, she says. There are 24 shrub roses in the Easy Elegance series, including roses that sail through bone-chilling winters, stand up to summer's heat and humidity, do not need spraying, and can be pruned with confidence even by novices.

"They sell like hotcakes," Hamill says.

Gardeners like red roses best, Hamill says. Pink comes in second. Bicolor roses -- pink with a touch of salmon, for example -- are popular, too. Consumers are attracted to plants with both buds and blooms, and shrub roses are such prolific bloomers that they usually have some of each at all times. Fragrance is not so important, Hamill says, which is good because shrub roses have lots of charm but little scent, at least at present. "The golden goose is a fragrant shrub rose," she says, "and hybridizers are starting to make progress on that."

The rose garden at Olbrich Gardens sets one of the prettiest examples of the new style that you'll ever see, full of romance. Along the garden's paved pathways, visitors make the acquaintance of dozens of roses, planted right in among ornamental grasses, hydrangeas and other flowering shrubs, small trees and lots of annual and perennial flowers. The roses are chosen for a great summer show and for their hardiness through Madison's deep-freeze winters. They include Easy Elegance shrub roses and roses in the Canadian Explorer series, hybridized in Ottawa and Quebec and known for their extreme hardiness and disease resistance.

Over the years, Epping has reinterpreted the use of roses throughout Olbrich's 16 acres. Old-fashioned rugosa roses were once among his favorites, but they're plagued by Japanese beetles in summer, "and they're just not going to make up the backbone of a rose garden," he says. Rose midges, tiny larvae that infest rose buds and blight the blooms, can also be a problem, Epping says, particularly on florist-type roses. Beating the bugs requires drenching the soil with parasitic nematodes several times to kill the larvae, and it doesn't always work. "We're phasing these roses out," Epping says. Shrub roses take their place. They resist pests and bloom strongly, partly because they produce so many flowers that you may not even notice if you lose a few buds to the bugs.

Spring and summer are the best time to plant these shrub roses. Look for roses growing in containers, not bare-root plants wrapped up in bundles. Container-grown roses make a quick transition into your garden. They need a sunny spot (eight hours of sun a day) and well-drained soil. Pay attention to watering while they are becoming established, and spread an organic mulch around them (compost, or mulch from a garden shop) to help moderate the soil temperature, preserve moisture in the soil and help control weeds. Get these roses off to a good start, and they'll take it from there.

(For editorial questions, please contact Clint Hooker at chooker@amuniversal.com.)

Gardeners can't take water for granted anymore. Drought-resistant garden design and drought-tolerant plants are the wave of the future.

Southern California is leading the way with water-wise landscaping practices, but even if you live where you can count on a great deal more than their two inches of rainfall a year, water is getting to be an expensive resource. Garden designs that emphasize water-thrifty plants are appropriate everywhere.

Barbara Paul, a landscape designer in Long Beach, California, turns to plants from the Mediterranean region, with its bone-dry summers, for her colorful, drought-tolerant landscapes. Paul teaches classes on drought-tolerant plants and design for the water department in Long Beach, which offers financial incentives and a selection of free garden plans to encourage homeowners to eliminate thirsty lawns and replace them with water-wise landscapes. The program emphasizes front-yard gardens because the water department wants neighbors to see the results.

Removing a traditional lawn and replacing it with a different kind of landscaping doesn't mean you have to grow cactus, Paul says. Her flower-bed designs place tough, drought-tolerant succulents right next to billowy plants like salvias, which she loves for their long period of bloom and because they attract hummingbirds and butterflies. She relies on freesia, crocosmia and other warm-season bulbs -- many from dry areas of South Africa -- to give her clients' landscapes character and long-lasting color.

"I also like to talk about structure -- about walkways, dry stream beds and patios," Paul says. Structural design elements are crucial to defining a garden's spaces, but they also never need water. A fence, an arbor, a line of steppingstones or a carefully placed bench can dramatically change the way you experience a garden. Suddenly, a swath of lawn seems less essential because there are so many other things going on. "When you work with this for long enough, turf-grass lawns look really boring," Paul says. Some homeowners want a lawn for children or pets, "but I ask my clients to rethink how much lawn they really need."

The Long Beach Water Department's suggested landscaping plans for homeowners are full of great ideas for gardens anywhere. These are not sterile, dreary conversions of traditional landscapes, but inspiring designs that transform turf-heavy front yards into welcoming and interesting gardens. Iceberg roses, Mexican bush sage, penstemons and perennial geraniums all show up on these plans. Small shrubs, tough ornamental grasses, boxwoods and lavender all contribute structure, texture and fragrance to these refreshing and colorful gardens.

California is not alone. Botanical gardens across the country are offering sustainability workshops, developing lists of drought-tolerant plants and including low-water-use display areas to educate visitors and demonstrate that horticultural beauty and water conservation can go hand in hand. Some gardens, such as the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin, Texas, emphasize native plants and naturalistic landscapes. Olbrich Botanical Gardens in Madison, Wisconsin, recently opened a delightfully unexpected gravel garden, densely planted with hardy, drought-tolerant plants, right at the entrance to the garden. On Olbrich's 16-acre grounds, rain barrels, rain gardens and low-maintenance lawn alternatives show how a lush, first-class botanical garden can lead the way in water conservation.

For businesses that develop and introduce plants, drought tolerance is a big priority these days, says Jeff Gibson, landscape business manager for the Ball Horticultural Company, an international plant company that introduced the popular Wave series of prolific petunias. Gardeners, garden designers and landscape contractors all want environmentally friendly, low-maintenance gardens, he says. Even where the annual rainfall totals normally register well up in the double digits, prolonged dry spells put a lot of stress on plants and lead to high mortality, disappointing performance or high water bills.

To help professionals and gardeners choose wisely, Ball developed a sustainability index to highlight its most drought-tolerant offerings. Dozens of hard-working annual and perennial flowers are on the list, including lantanas, angelonias, coneflowers and vincas.

These durable plants are also tough enough to survive the widespread condition that Gibson calls "self-inflicted drought," which occurs when plants are grown in exceptionally challenging sites, soils and temperatures. Plants growing along the street or driveway or under trees often suffer from unusually dry conditions, he says. Plants growing next to a driveway are exposed to tremendous amounts of reflected light and heat, so they tend to lose a lot more moisture to evaporation than you might expect. Mailbox gardens or the corners of a yard are often beyond the reach of sprinklers. And trees compete with flowers and shrubs not only for light, but for moisture and nutrients in the soil. Rain doesn't solve these problems for long, but drought-tolerant plants do, Gibson says.

The best way to grow beautiful plants that need extra water is to use them sensibly, Gibson says. Thirsty plants will thrive in a big pot by the front door, for example, where they will have lots of impact, and where they can be watered relatively easily when necessary. Grouping plants that need extra moisture together, so they can all be watered at once, saves water and time, and it helps ensure that none are neglected. New plants that need water while they become established can be spot-watered with a watering can instead of a sprinkler. Spraying the whole garden when you really just need to water a new shrub is wasteful, and you miss something of the joy of gardening. "Hand-watering is fun," says Barbara Paul, who admits she keeps a bucket in the bathtub and uses the shower water for her plants. They don't need much.

Sources

-- Long Beach's Lawn-to-Garden website is a good resource for gardeners everywhere. There are free landscape design plans for drought-tolerant gardens, with tips, plant lists, lots of before-and-after images of garden makeovers and virtual garden tours at lblawntogarden.com.

-- Landscape designer Barbara Paul, who also teaches classes for homeowners as part of the Long Beach Water Department's Lawn-to-Garden program, writes about drought-tolerant gardening and shows images of great gardens on her website, gardenssss.com; her work can also be found on houzz.com.

-- To find a landscape designer in your area, check the website of the Association of Professional Landscape Designers, apld.com.

-- Ball Horticultural Company develops and introduces new plants. You can read about landscape sustainability and water-wise plants on the company's landscape website, balllandscape.com. The site also has downloadable plant lists and a link to a map showing U.S. drought conditions.

-- Olbrich Botanical Gardens in Madison, Wisconsin; olbrich.org.

-- Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin, Texas; wildflower.org.

(For editorial questions, please contact Clint Hooker at chooker@amuniversal.com.)