It’s Support Your Independent Nursery month! Each Wednesday in October I’m posting about one of my favorite independent garden centers in the Austin area. Today I’m shining a spotlight on The Great Outdoors, located just south of the hip strip known as SoCo on South Congress Avenue. (This is an update of a recent post I wrote about TGO.)

For a nursery within spitting distance of downtown, The Great Outdoors is surprisingly large, which befits a place featuring a nearly life-size topiary elephant as its mascot and another on its sign.

From the street you glimpse a colorful mural, a screen of ornamental grasses, cannas, Pride of Barbados…

…and a rainbow of flowering purslane.

The nursery is situated on a sloping, live oak-shaded property, with shady paths leading to well-marked plant sections.

The succulent and cactus area is always tempting.

Mmm, look at all that agave goodness.

They’re all so gorgeous.

This is one of my current faves: Agave americana mediopicta ‘Alba.’

Down the hill, a gift shop surprises with a green roof.

Smaller cacti and succulents are offered here.

A lot of these are tender in our climate, but they can be treated as annuals or brought inside for the winter.

Fun garden decor abounds.

Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

Tempting displays of glazed pots and fountains

Here’s a nice combo: white echinacea and silver artemesia. This would be perfect for a moonlight garden, and it’s visually cooling during the day.

This is inspirational: silvery plants (acacia, silver ponyfoot, gopher plant) paired with white pots.

The sun-loving perennials and butterfly-attracting plants occupy the main part of the nursery, with a vegetable section under the arbor.

Pots for those hot-hued plants

And when the death star is trying to kill your gardening joy, embrace summer (or Halloween) with grim reaper garden art.

More pots—a rainbow of choices.

These metal roosters would be the perfect decor for all those Austin hen houses, and they’re quiet too.

Zebra plant (Aphelandra squarrosa) in lemon-yellow pots

An eye-catching wall display near the checkout counter

The Great Outdoors carries a good selection of natives and well-adapted perennials, as well as clumping bamboo, semi-hardy Australian acacias, tropicals, and agaves and other succulents. The garden art is fun and mostly of the kitschy variety, and you can find lots of glazed pots and a few water features for sale. A cafe with a shady deck sits at street level and overlooks the nursery, providing a great spot to take a break and ponder your plant list, which you’re about to deviate from with some impulse buys. And who can blame you?

Join me next Wednesday as I post about Hill Country Water Gardens & Nursery. For a look back at my post about The Natural Gardener, click here. And please check out my sidebar link Area Nurseries, where I’ve posted photo tours of many of our local garden centers and described what I like about each one. Austin gardeners are blessed with so many good local nurseries. Let’s support them in this tough economy and help them stay in business. I can’t imagine gardening without them. Can you?

Also, check out these posts about The Great Outdoors by other Austin garden bloggers:
J Peterson Garden Design
Gardening in Austin

And don’t forget about the Austin Nurseries Giveaway, going on now through October 26. I’m hosting a giveaway for a $100 gift certificate and Fall Power Package from Barton Springs Nursery, and 7 other Austin bloggers are hosting giveaways from other area nurseries. Visit all 8 posts and leave comments to enter!

All material © 2006-2011 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

As if there weren’t enough garden tours in Austin this spring, I drove up to Dallas on May 21st for that city’s Open Days tour benefiting the Garden Conservancy, accompanied by my daughter. Undaunted by the 3-hour drive, we arrived first at the exotically named Blue Lotus garden as a morning fog lifted. Do you sense a South Austin vibe going on here?

But before we get to the back, here’s what you see streetside: a large, gravelly berm taking up half the front yard and planted with a xeric assortment of prickly pear, agave, yucca, cholla, and sotol. Well! This is not what I expected to see in Dallas, which I imagined as a sea of manicured lawns, foundation azaleas and hydrangeas, and shade trees.

I admired the water-conserving beauty of the front garden, but I couldn’t help wondering, where was the exoticism hinted at in the name?

Here it is. On the front porch painted Indonesian furniture and colorful pillows provide a cool retreat. Eastern decor meets the western-style garden, and somehow it works.

Charming pots of cacti add a contemporary note.

Walking around to the driveway, which leads to the back garden, we passed this shimmering Yucca rostrata juxtaposed with moisture-loving, invasive horsetail reed, neatly contained by the concrete drive.

In between the two stands a blue door framing a banana tree. Can you tell this is going to be a bold-foliage garden?

Interesting details pop up even along the drive.

And then you enter the Blue Lotus garden proper. First impressions: this is an open garden where you can see pretty much everything all at once; the owners didn’t go for the “garden room” effect. And yet there are different areas to explore, each with an inviting focal point. Also, the lawn has been shrunk to an easily managed yet still cooling handkerchief of green, with a generous gravel patio spreading into the garden from the back door—great for entertaining. And wow! Look at those corrugated-steel panels covered with graffiti. More on that in a minute.

A beautiful steel bowl with a purple water lily greets you at the entrance. Goldfish dart under the leaves. (Can they survive in this shallow bowl during the heat of summer, I wonder?)

Beautiful Asian statuary, like this Buddha on a carved-lotus pedestal, graces the garden.

The owners have a flair for succulent containers.

Against the back of the house, a trough-style water feature spouts streams from three copper pipes into a small, sunken pool. A trellis planted with what looks like Clematis armandii rises above the trough.

A casual, colorful seating area on the gravel patio is accented with bright annuals planted in Wooly Pockets.

I must admit that I don’t really get the Wooly Pocket craze; they aren’t nearly as pretty as other sorts of containers. But this garden made them look better than any I’ve seen.

In the background, screening the corner and a large rainwater cistern, stands the most unique piece of garden art I’ve seen in a long time. I asked one of the owners about it, and she said they’d commissioned a 19-year-old graffiti artist to paint it. That’s his signature on the bottom left. The winged horse on the right represents Dallas, the octopus their love of the ocean, and the sunset city skyline Los Angeles. The blue lotus is, of course, their garden and their landscape design business. I love it.

Nearby an Indonesian-style pavilion offers a shady spot to rest.

This pretty lamp hangs from the rafters.

A weathered stone Buddha head ornaments a bed of succulents.

Behind the pavilion, a chicken coop shelters these peeping pullets.

At the back of the garden, a large edible garden with corn and other vegetables grows behind a charming iron bedstead planted with a coverlet of thyme and other herbs, with pillows of Mexican heather. The bedside tables are actually…

…working beehives! Honeybees were buzzing around the hives but tolerated close-up looks from those of us curious enough to get pictures.

Each zinc-covered “tabletop” is decorated just-so with a lace doily and a potted cactus.

Adorable

Near a grove of bamboo (had they battled it back to this corner?) stand several tiered fountains and a seahorse birdbath planted to overflowing with succulents.

I’d love to have this in my own garden.

Ganesh relaxes nearby.

Another look at the graffiti wall over the head of a striped canna.

One last stunning feature grabs your attention as you depart: a shiny, galvanized-steel wall lined with a long, skinny water garden filled with ‘Holy Fire’ lotus.

The lotus were in bud, and the owner said they typically bloom in early June. I was sad to have missed them. But even the leaves are lovely.

At the far end, a granite bench beckons, backed by a fringe of inland sea oats (Chasmanthium latifolium). A Wooly Pocket wall planter elevates the garden to eye level.

What a great start to our tour. I felt very at home in this garden and could easily imagine it in Austin. To read more about the owner-designers Trey and Brianne Denton, click for a story from the Dallas Morning News.

Tune in tomorrow for a look at our next stop, the English-style Rister-Armstrong garden in the Knox/Henderson neighborhood.

All material © 2006-2011 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

I was particularly interested to see Sheryl Williams’s garden during our sneak peek on Tuesday because she’s a fairly new Austin garden blogger, and, well, y’all know how I love our garden-blogging group. I’d met Sheryl before, but this was my first time to see her garden in person, having followed its progress on her blog, Yard Fanatic.

Red yucca (Hesperaloe parviflora) in bloom

Sheryl is a woman who knows what she wants and has the know-how to make it happen. She moved to Austin from Portland, Oregon, two years ago and told us she house-shopped by finding likely homes and then scoping the street for front-yard gardeners who weren’t necessarily obsessed with neatness. That was to her a good sign, and she’d walk over and ask them how the neighborhood treated them and their gardens.

A favorable response on her current street helped make up her mind about the house, and soon after she moved in she killed her entire front and back lawn. While a couple of neighbors expressed concern, she soon made converts of them with an alternative lawn of native Texas sedge, which she purchased in 15 flats from Barton Springs Nursery. She considered liriope, she told us, but chose the sedge because she wanted a native plant with the look of lawn grass to blend in with the neighborhood, but with none of the mowing and almost no need of supplemental water. Last summer, in fact, she never once watered it (it was already established; don’t do this with a newly installed landscape). Yes, it tends to go dormant (i.e., tan) in dry summers if not watered, but it greens up, she said, fall through spring.

Metal chickens strutting their stuff in a patch of pink evening primrose (Oenothera speciosa)

Portland and Austin share an 8b hardiness zone, but Sheryl often marvels on her blog about how different those zones really are. Spring comes earlier to Austin, and our summer is brutally hot. We get much less rain, and when it comes, it arrives in thundering gully-washers that can carry away one’s garden. We have lots of bugs.

Russelia equisetiformis, or firecracker fern

Sheryl’s house is on a sloping street, and she quickly learned that rain would sheet across her property and collect in her downhill neighbor’s driveway. It made her crazy, she said, to see that water go to waste when she wanted it to soak into her yard. She was determined to capture all that rain and keep it on her property. So she trenched shallow ditches around the perimeter of her entire yard and built up berms, which serve to slow runoff and capture it. She plants the berms with xeric perennials for color. Lo and behold, her neighbor’s driveway no longer pools with water, and Sheryl gets to keep all that goodness where her plants can use it.

Sheryl also set up a rainwater harvesting system to capture every drop of rain from her roof in cisterns like this one. She even keeps a bucket set in the ground to collect the condensate from her A/C unit, which she uses to hand water her plants.

Whereas her front garden gives a nod to the neighborhood aesthetic of lawn and perennial borders, her back yard is fully devoted to a large organic vegetable garden.

Blackberries are ripening on a vertical trellis.

There’s a ripe one!

Colorful chard has its own raised bed…

as does eggplant.

A few tough shrubs and perennials, like this yarrow, soften the edges of the raised beds and add color.

There’s also a deck and a patio where Sheryl can relax and admire her garden and enjoy a handful of fresh-picked vegetables…

…and a glass of sun tea.

My thanks to all the hosts for welcoming us to their gardens, and especially to Sheryl for the delicious green salads she made for us. For a look back at Sue Nazar’s shady, lush, deer-resistant garden (and links to 3 other gardens on the tour) click here. Two additional private gardens will be on Saturday’s tour: Jeff Pavlat’s masterful cactus and succulent garden and Joe Posern’s garden, which I’ve not yet seen.

Inside Austin Gardens Tour
“Water-Wise Gardening”
Saturday, May 14, 9am–4pm
Tickets available at each garden on the day of the tour; a single-garden entry costs $5, or pay $10 to see all 7 tour sites.

Gardening Demonstrations / Education Sessions in Sheryl Williams’s garden:
9:30 Ed Parken – Rainwater Harvesting
10:30 Ed Parken – Rainwater Harvesting
11:30 Ed Parken – Rainwater Harvesting
1:30 Sheryl Williams – Keeping All Your Rainwater & Collecting Some of the Neighbors’

All material © 2006-2011 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.