Summer can be excruciatingly hot, so who wants to garden, right? It's way too hot to be digging large planting holes. It certainly isn't the time one would choose to renovate sections of the garden or to tackle that long put-off garden project.

However, it's a great time to add creative elements to your garden and work on creating those outdoor rooms! Rearrange or acquire new garden furniture. It's great to hunt for vintage furniture and scour yard sales for unusual pieces. As with indoor decorating, your garden should reflect you and your family so that everyone feels comfortable there.

Create a wonderful retreat away from the house under a big oak tree. Place furniture so that family and guests can easily converse with one another, enjoy breathtaking views and listen to the trickling stream. If you don't have a natural water element in your garden, now would be a great time to add one! Did you know studies have shown that a water element can actually lower one's body temperature by 2 degrees on a hot day? Prefabricated concrete or stone fountains generally take less than an hour to set up and are quite easy to care for. However, they're heavy so enlist the help of some neighbor kids.

Now…sit back and relax with friends and enjoy a cool beverage or two (a lavender lemonade sounds good to me).

Leaves that are brown at the tip and along the edges reflect a condition called leaf scorch. This can be caused by disease, but is often caused by the leaves losing water faster than the roots can absorb it. Leaf scorch often starts during mid-summer because of hotter weather and winds. It's common on new plants because of their limited root systems, which either are not receiving enough water, or are too small to absorb enough water during hot weather.

A thorough watering usually prevents further damage. If the plant is set on shallow soil, scorch will be a perennial problem and you should either replace the plant with one that can take these conditions, or water on a regular basis.

Leaf scorch on house plants often indicates too much fertilizer or too many salts in the soil. If this is the case, flushing out the salts and fertilizer will prevent further damage.