Playing in The Gardens on Spring Creek in Fort Collins
September 12, 2018 During our Great American West road trip last month, my daughter and I passed through charming Fort Collins, Colorado, and visited The Gardens on Spring Creek, the city’s community-oriented botanic garden. The entry garden was ablaze with late-summer flowers like purple coneflower, rudbeckia, and cleome. Pink cleome ...
Sissinghurst Castle Garden, part 2: White Garden, meadow, and tower views
August 04, 2018 Has any garden been more admired, copied, and written about than Vita Sackville-West’s White Garden at Sissinghurst? We visited in mid-June, and I was excited to finally step into this glowing space and see it for myself. Twilight would be better for appreciating the pale effect of ...
Sissinghurst Castle Garden, part 1: Walls and roses in the English countryside
August 03, 2018 Sissinghurst. Mecca to gardeners worldwide. Like every traveling gardener, I’d put Sissinghurst Castle Garden at the top of my bucket list, and when we started planning a trip to England I insisted on seeing the famous garden of Vita Sackville-West. So one sunny mid-June morning, we drove ...
Tea in Rosemary Verey’s garden at Barnsley House
July 30, 2018 Elton John worked with her on his garden. Prince Charles too. I’m sure everyone who knows anything about garden design or English gardens knows of the late Rosemary Verey. But I confess I knew nothing of her when I visited the famous designer and author’s former home ...
Shopping and English breakfast at Burford Garden Company
July 25, 2018 Before we visited Victoria Summerley’s garden in Bibury, England, last month, we stopped along the way at Burford Garden Company, a nursery, home decor, clothing, furniture, kitchenware, and gift shop. Oh, and did I mention they have a restaurant too? The place is huge, with a diversity ...
Cotswolds country charm at Victoria Summerley’s Awkward Hill Cottage
July 19, 2018 It wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that my family and I traveled to England last month to see gardens. Particularly, romantic English gardens in the rosy flush of June. And specifically, three gardens I’ve longed to see for years: the famous estate gardens Sissinghurst and Great ...
Kew Gardens walkabout: Mediterranean Garden, Treetop Walkway, and more
July 15, 2018 London’s Kew Gardens is a big place at 300 acres, with a variety of gardens, glasshouses, a magnificent arboretum, and other attractions. During my mid-June visit on a family vacation, I saw as much as I could during a 4- or 5-hour visit. Here’s the last installment ...
The buzz at Kew: The Hive and its pollinator-attracting meadow
July 11, 2018 At London’s Kew Gardens last month, I explored the buzzed-about interactive art installation The Hive. Airily constructed of aluminum and towering nearly 56 feet high (which seems even higher atop a small hill), The Hive was created by artist Wolfgang Buttress for the 2015 Milan Expo. It ...
Roses, swans, and ravens: Rambling in London’s parks and Tower of London
July 08, 2018 We arrived in London in mid-June, where we stayed two nights and spent our days eating fish and chips and Indian food, sightseeing, and rambling in London’s excellent parks. (We also visited the magnificent Kew Gardens, which I’ll share in my next post.) London’s public parks made ...
Historic kitchen garden at Château de La Roche-Guyon
July 06, 2018 Our mid-June French château-visiting plan was foiled when we missed the last house tour at Château d’Ambleville (not that I minded, with that wonderful garden to explore). But like I said, you can’t throw a rock without hitting a castle in France. So we drove 15 minutes ...
Hedge fun: The Italian Renaissance garden of Château d’Ambleville
July 05, 2018 So many châteaux (manor houses, mostly, but also palaces and castles) litter the French countryside that today some can be purchased for a relative song. We were not looking to buy, however, but merely to visit a couple of châteaux in mid-June, after our tour of Monet’s ...
Kirk Walden’s Hill Country garden atop Lake Austin
May 25, 2018 With this killer view of Lake Austin, many homeowners might have sodded a lawn, plunked a few pots of annuals around the pool, and called it done. But Kirk Walden, whose garden was the final stop on the recent Austin Garden Bloggers Fling tour (I photographed it ...
Bloom spikes!
May 19, 2018 This is the bloom-spikiest spring I can remember in Austin. All over town, agaves, sotols, aloes, hesperaloes, mangaves, manfredas, and yuccas are sending up flowering wands or blooming candelabras. My own garden is no exception, but the spikes I’m most excited by are towering over two Texas ...
A little Palm Springs, a little New Orleans, all Texas in the garden of Curt Arnette
May 16, 2018 I’ve been after my friend Curt Arnette, landscape-architect owner of Sitio Design, to open his personal garden on tour for years. But because he likes to change things up at home (plus being busy with his work projects), he’s always said it wasn’t ready. Persistence pays off, ...
Owlets peeking out of the owl box
May 13, 2018 The most exciting time of screech owl nesting season is here! The owlets have grown big and curious enough to climb to the doorway and look out at the world for the first time. For the past several days we’ve seen the tops of fuzzy heads in ...
Bloggers soaked up Austin at Garden Bloggers Fling
May 11, 2018 For 11 years I’ve traveled to cities around North America to attend Garden Bloggers Fling, and I’ve helped organize two Flings held in Austin — in and again last weekend. Normally I take hundreds of pictures of the gardens I visit. (Go to Categories in my sidebar ...
