You'll find lots of advice these days about putting your garden to bed in the fall, but this is a season of life and color. Don't let your garden sleep through it!

Great gardens, in fact, practically never sleep. If you choose plants carefully, design for year-round interest and use your imagination, your garden will be as pretty in the year's waning months -- or in the snow -- as it is in high summer.

After summer's heat, it's pleasant to be able to get outdoors a little more, but there's no pressure to try to accomplish everything at once. The fall is a time for puttering. If you've planned ahead, the asters are blooming now, ornamental grasses flaunt their feathery flower heads, a few choice shrubs are displaying ripe berries, and roses, revived by cooler temperatures, produce blooms of the most intense color and fragrance of the year. The days are growing shorter, and on a crisp fall day, time seems richer than ever as you plant solid, crinkly-skinned tulip and daffodil bulbs by the dozens.

Fall is also a good time to do a little bit of pruning, cutting back shrubs that encroach on paths or block views. You can save the hard work of renovating overgrown plants until spring. In the fall, just make selective cuts to enhance the appearance of deciduous shrubs and tidy up the growth habits of evergreens. Too much cutting can stimulate growth here at the wrong season for it, so step back from your snipping after a just a few minutes. Now is mainly a time to admire and enjoy your garden.

Fall is the traditional season of chrysanthemums, and garden shops are well stocked with their brilliant inspiration. Mums' blazing orange, yellow and deep russet flowers echo the colors of autumn leaves and last for weeks in flower beds or in pots on the porch. Alongside the mums, make room for brightly colored pansies, which flourish in cool fall temperatures and even bloom through winter where temperatures are mild. Tiny violas are sturdier than pansies, and perhaps even more charming. They're especially pretty up close, so plant them along paths or in pots where you can admire them as you come and go.

Look beyond these classics at your local garden shop, and you're likely to find dianthus, snapdragons, calendulas and lots of fall grasses ready to pop into pots. Marigolds aren't just summer blooms; they are some of the best fall flowers for their rich colors, pleasingly neat habit and long-lasting blooms.

Vegetable gardeners may lament the season's last tomatoes, but there is actually a lot to look forward to in the fall: This is the season of beautiful, healthy greens. Many garden shops sell transplants in the fall, for an almost-instant vegetable garden. Kale, Swiss chard and radicchio, known for their natural cold tolerance, taste better after a light frost. Salad greens planted now will provide lettuce for a month or more, especially if you cover the plants on cold nights with spun fabric row covers, which allow light to penetrate but provide several degrees of frost protection.

Fall vegetable gardens are easy to care for: There are far fewer bugs and blights during this season, and cooler temperatures limit the amount of moisture lost to evaporation, so an occasional deep soaking is all your plants will normally need. If you're new to vegetable gardening, fall is a great time to get started -- you're sure to have a successful harvest, which will build your confidence for next year. If you're an old hand, you already know that food gardens in fall are simply more fun and less work than summer crops. Leafy fall greens are also great companion plants for flowers. Swiss chard, mustard, lettuce and kale add texture and color to pots full of mums, asters, marigolds and other blooms.

You'll have more time to enjoy your fall garden if you stow the rake and simply mow over autumn leaves, crushing them to tiny shreds that disappear as you walk behind your mower. Crushed leaves decompose quickly and put nutrients back into the soil. Autumn leaves also make the world's best compost. Use the bagger attachment on a mulching mower to gather leaves, which will automatically be mixed with a few late-season grass clippings in a perfect blend for a compost pile. You can also use this mix of crushed leaves and grass clippings as mulch in flower beds. Mulch applied in fall helps hold moisture in the soil, protects plants from extreme soil temperature fluctuations and helps limit the germination of weed seeds. As the mulch breaks down over the winter, it adds nutrients to the soil, which puts you a few steps ahead of the game when spring comes around.

The best fall gardens have a way of turning your head, adding depth and beauty to a lovely new season. They're naturally rich in color and variety. This is a season for both harvesting and planting, for a fresh palette and a different gardening perspective. As the days grow shorter and the shadows grow longer, pull on a sweater and spend some time in the garden. There is so much to appreciate at this time of year.

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

Even if the daily mail doesn't amount to much, a cheerful mailbox garden stamps you as First Class in the neighborhood. It's also a fun gardening opportunity.

Mailboxes perched on posts at the curb give you a chance to create a postage-stamp garden design. Think of the mailbox as a piece of functional sculpture that gives your little garden both a focal point and a vertical element. Then design around it, choosing hard-working plants that will thrive in the usually rather challenging conditions at the curb.

A mailbox on a sturdy post must be front and center in your design. It can stand no more than eight inches from the curb, according to U.S. Postal Service recommendations. To make the best impression on the mail carrier and everyone else who passes by, the garden around the box should look attractive year round. You might start with a couple of small evergreen shrubs, as a conifer collector in Norfolk, Virginia, did when she designed her mailbox garden. Her evergreens anchor the plantings, are in perfect proportion, and give the bed definition even in the winter. Dwarf conifers are a good choice because they grow slowly: They will never overwhelm the space.

A gardener in Madison, Wisconsin, who favors naturalistic landscaping and has a meadow in her backyard, designed a mailbox bed to reflect her gardening style. She created a miniature meadow around her curbside mailbox using just a handful of plants. In a spot less than three feet on a side, she planted short prairie grasses, bright yellow coreopsis, bold purple coneflowers and a drift of black-eyed Susans. None of these plants needs special attention, and the design looks pretty through the winter, when the grasses turn into a tawny backdrop for the bristling black seed heads of coneflowers and black-eyed Susans.

Curbside gardens are not the place for plants that need pampering. Of course, you'll need to water the plants while they become established, but drought tolerance is important when you're choosing plants that must thrive at the end of the driveway, a long distance from the nearest spigot. Mailbox-garden plants are also subject to a lot of wear and tear. Even the most careful mail carrier may drive over plants that creep or flop across the curb, or step on ground covers.

You'll want sturdy plants at the front of the bed, on the street side. Small grasses and tough ground covers such as ajuga or creeping phlox will bounce back from occasional trampling. A ribbon of daylilies set back about six inches from the curb will produce a magnificent show of color through the summer, and if the foliage along the curb is damaged, it will not affect the flowers. Depending on the location of your mailbox and your driveway, you may want to choose plants that grow no more than about two feet tall, so they will not block your view as you pull out of the driveway.

Not all mailbox gardens have to be planted around a post. Sometimes, the garden might be a few steps behind the mailbox itself, forming a living backdrop protected from the challenges of a street-side planting but still reaching out to the neighborhood with a stylish punctuation mark of flowers. Pushing the garden back a little way also allows you to grow taller plants without obstructing mail delivery. This could be an opportunity to include a small tree in the scene, perhaps a spring-blooming magnolia or a crabapple. A gardener near Washington, D.C., made a round bed separated from her mailbox by a strip of grass. She planted a small magnolia in the center and a little cottage garden of perennial flowers around it. The bed looks beautiful from the street and draws the eye further toward plantings in the rest of the garden.

In some neighborhoods, monumental mailboxes are a slightly intimidating presence at the curb. They look more like barricades than small architectural elements around which to plant a garden, but adding just a few plants can soften their appearance. Ornamental grasses are especially effective when planted just behind such massive mailboxes, taking some of the hard edges off a brick pillar. In front, there may be room for a row of liriope, an indestructible plant with leaves that are grasslike, but more sophisticated. It will dress up the base of the pillar, just as foundation plants soften the transition between a house and a garden.

Perennials are classic mailbox garden plants because they come back every year. Chrysanthemums, iris, lavender, spiderwort, sedum, daylilies and phlox will all thrive in a sunny mailbox bed. In a shadier place, ferns, coral bells, lamium and hellebores are surprisingly resilient. Roses are tempting, but plants with thorns might complicate things for the mail carrier.

Supplement the perennials with colorful annual flowers -- zinnias, cleome, pentas, petunias -- that will bloom through the summer. A well-behaved vine, such as clematis, mandevilla or black-eyed Susan vine, will dress up the mailbox post.

Like any garden, a mailbox garden will evolve over the seasons and through the years. Borrow ideas from your regular garden and prowl the neighborhood and the internet for inspiration. Above all, don't let the limited size of a mailbox garden constrain your imagination. Good things come in small packages.

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

The National Park Service turns 100 this year, and it's something to celebrate in a big way. Visit a park and let the beauty and majesty of nature overwhelm you -- and then take your sense of the uplifting experience home with you. You can't recreate Yosemite or Yellowstone in your backyard, but the powerful lessons of national parks are meaningful even if your own private park is a tiny courtyard in town.

Mark Swartz, a park ranger and coordinator of the NPS centennial, draws a lot of his thinking from Frederick Law Olmsted, the great landscape architect and designer of New York's Central Park and many other important parks. In his writings in the late 19th century, Olmsted actually helped lay the groundwork for the National Park Service, Swartz says.

"He was particularly attuned to the stresses of the urban environment," Swartz says, and "one of the key things was the effect that exposure to landscapes can have on people's physical and emotional health." Olmsted knew that spending time in nature provided relief from the cares of the world. "He really nails it," Swartz says.

Visiting a national park "is like a time-out in your life," Swartz says. Yet parks are not lonely places: They bring people together in discovering nature and their place in it. Naturally, visitors want to hold on to the feelings national parks inspire.

Olmsted understood the spontaneity of nature, which is completely different from designed spaces. For him, a naturalistic garden would be the best private refuge, Swartz says, but "we all have our own interpretations of what inspires us and restores us." There are other cues to follow.

The National Park Service works hard in many ways to set a good example for home gardeners, says Charlie Pepper, an NPS landscape maintenance and sustainability expert. The Park Service has instituted practices to reduce the use of pesticides and other chemicals in parks, for example. "We're managing the quality of plants in our landscapes," Pepper says, and gardeners can do that at home, too.

Native plants and pollinator plants are increasingly important in national parks, Pepper says. Native plants are naturally adapted to local climates and conditions. They are resilient and not likely to require fertilizers or pesticides, and they do not depend on supplemental watering.

The National Park Service also has a pollinator program and establishes plantings with the express purpose of supporting birds, bees, butterflies, bats and other pollinators, whose habitats have been threatened by development and widespread use of pesticides. Pollinator plants and the insects they attract "improve the richness of the plant palette," Pepper says. Among other initiatives, the NPS is monitoring bee diversity in Boston, keeping an inventory of butterflies in the Rocky Mountains, and planting for pollinators to help keep apple trees healthy in the historic orchard at Adams National Historical Park in Massachusetts.

New planting and maintenance practices have also improved experiences for visitors, Pepper says, describing a change at Valley Forge, where many acres of land were once mowed every two weeks during the growing season. Now, native-plant meadows have replaced much of the turf grass, increasing biodiversity in the park and reducing its carbon footprint. The meadows are full of life, and views of the tall grasses are serene. "They evoke the sense that this place is important: They convey the qualities and patina of an older landscape," Pepper says.

One of the best ways to create your own personal park is to plant a tree, says R.J. Laverne, education specialist with the Davey Tree Company, a partner with the National Parks Foundation, an organization that supports the Park Service. Beautiful trees in your garden and neighborhood have both physical and emotional benefits, he says. They make an urban or suburban landscape more pleasing and natural. Good trees change the whole character of a neighborhood.

You don't have to plant a mighty oak, not to mention a majestic redwood, to get the desired effect. Small ornamental trees -- or even trees in pots -- are said to help reduce stress and increase your ability to concentrate. If you have room for it, plant a tree that will grow into a large specimen, Laverne says, but there is no single perfect choice. "It's like asking a car dealer to recommend the perfect car," he says. "Maybe the Ferrari is the way to go. Maybe the mini-van. Maybe the pickup. It depends."

The best tree is one that will thrive in your climate and conditions and is in scale with your landscape, Laverne says. Make sure your tree has room to grow. Do not plant it too close to the house -- an extremely common error -- or under utility lines. Your tree should not need the help of pesticides and fertilizers. "If you plant the right tree in the right place, you can sit back and watch it thrive," Laverne says.

Of course, every plant benefits from a little attention to watering while it becomes established. A mulch ring around your tree -- not piled up against the trunk -- will protect it from being bumped by the lawn mower or damaged by a string trimmer. Mulch also reduces competition from grass and weeds, and helps maintain even soil moisture and temperature.

Trees, like children, provide benefits even when they are small, which is good, because you may never see your tree at maturity. "A truly generous person is one who plants a tree under which they will never sit and enjoy the shade," Laverne says. But, like our national parks, a tree can be your legacy to the neighborhood, a personal park that grows to encompass something a little bigger and grander than its own spreading branches.

Sources

-- The National Park Service marks its 100th birthday on Aug. 25. To celebrate, visitors to National Parks will receive free admission from Aug. 25 through 28. The NPS website, nps.gov, has links to help you find national parks in your area (there are more than 400 parks), learn about centennial programs and events at the parks, and discover the National Parks Service history.

Free days are a great way to discover one of the 127 national parks that charge an entrance fee (normally from $3 to $30). Admission to other national parks is always free. Entrance fees are also waived on National Public Lands Day, Sept. 24, and on Veterans Day, Nov. 11.

-- The Davey Tree Expert Company, davey.com, works with communities, corporations, utilities and individuals on tree and landscape care and maintenance. The company's website includes information and advice on choosing, planting and taking care of trees and has links to certified arborists who can help you with your trees.

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