Garden tours 2015

December 21, 2015 Lucinda Hutson‘s purple cottage in the Rosedale neighborhood of central Austin is a wonderland of Mexican folk art, colorful furnishings, and brightly painted walls. I had the pleasure of re-visiting last Friday, and brought along new friend Paula Panich, a Los Angeles writer and teacher of garden ...

December 21, 2015 Lucinda Hutson‘s purple cottage in the Rosedale neighborhood of central Austin is a wonderland of Mexican folk art, colorful furnishings, and brightly painted walls. I had the pleasure of re-visiting last Friday, and brought along new friend Paula Panich, a Los Angeles writer and teacher of garden ...

December 10, 2015 The weather has been so beautiful lately — Austin’s payoff for making it through another summer. Last Sunday, the whole family joined me for an afternoon stroll at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, one of my very favorite places. Right now it’s a mix of fall ...

December 08, 2015 On a chilly, rainy Saturday in mid-November — a quiet traffic day — I headed to the University of Texas campus and actually found street parking at the G. B. Dealey Center for New Media (renamed from the Belo Center in 2021), whose landscaping I’ve wanted to ...

November 18, 2015 Last Saturday, a drizzly, cool day, I returned to the West Austin neighborhood of Rollingwood to see how the waterwise garden at city hall had fared over the summer. Designed by Scott Ogden and Lauren Springer Ogden, the garden was installed two years ago. Following an initial ...

November 11, 2015 Want to see the original native plants of central Texas? Take a stroll through Hartman Prehistoric Garden at Austin’s Zilker Botanical Garden. Designed to resemble a landscape that dinosaurs would have roamed, Hartman represents the late Cretaceous period (which ended 65 million years ago), when the shallow ...

October 29, 2015 The Huntington gardens near Los Angeles have, for years, been on my wish list of botanical gardens to visit. So I was thrilled to see an afternoon visit and after-hours photoshoot offered on the itinerary of the Garden Writers Association symposium on September 20. Unfortunately, it was ...

October 23, 2015 A long, shallow back yard sloping away from the house isn’t easy to turn into an inviting garden (I should know), but terracing and space-dividing hedges did the trick in this San Marino, California, garden. Owned by Robert and Caroline Volk and designed by Mark Bartos, this ...

October 22, 2015 The second private garden I toured during the Garden Writers Association symposium in Pasadena, California, last month turned out to be my favorite. Owned by Ann and Olin Barrett, the garden’s formal layout with cross axes and focal points is made California friendly and contemporary with bold, ...

October 19, 2015 I opened my garden as part of the Inside Austin Gardens Tour last Saturday. It was my first time to participate in a public garden tour, and after all the garden prep, it was wonderful to finally put down the pruners and the shovel and welcome people ...

October 16, 2015 A new yellow Hesperaloe parviflora peeks around a Yucca rostrata in the lower garden. I’ve attended many a garden tour, but I had no idea how much work prepping for one requires. Not because anyone tells you to, but because your own sense of perfectionism kicks in ...

October 15, 2015 I traveled to Los Angeles last month for the Garden Writers Association Symposium in Pasadena, which included an afternoon of three private garden visits. The first one we saw was Don and Marilyn Conlon’s, a formally designed garden filled with bold tropical blooms, like this hot-pink bougainvillea ...

October 12, 2015 After a year of preparation, it’s finally here: my first participation in a garden tour! This Saturday, October 17, from 9 am to 4 pm, my garden will be open to the public, along with 6 others, for the Inside Austin Gardens Tour. On the website, you ...

October 07, 2015 Twelve years ago, Los Angeles garden designer Susanna Dadd and her husband, artist James Griffith, built a back-yard amphitheater in a ravine alongside their Altadena home. Dubbing it The Folly Bowl, they’ve been hosting free, or nearly free, public concerts each summer, choosing unique performers that will ...

October 04, 2015 While in Los Angeles recently for Garden Writers Association, I spent a day off-conference touring private gardens that Annette Gutierrez of Potted arranged for a small group of us. One of these was the garden of Joy and Roland Feuer, a welcoming and artistic couple who constructed ...

September 28, 2015 Concrete orb shish-kabobs in Dustin’s garden The Death Star was blasting mercilessly when I visited designer Dustin Gimbel’s garden in Long Beach, CA, last week — not at all in the mellow, sunny-L.A. way I’d been led to expect. But perhaps Diana and I are fated to ...