My friend Lucinda Hutson invited me over to her purple cottage on Sunday to see her angel’s trumpets in bloom, plus all the rest of her exuberant, flowery garden.

Lighting up her quiet Rosedale neighborhood street like a fiesta in full swing, Lucinda’s garden is an irresistible mix of color, romance, humor, and creativity. Colorful paint brightens every vertical surface: house (3 different body colors, depending on which side you’re looking at), wooden fences, and a detached garage-turned-shed. Flowering roses, angel’s trumpets, and sweet peas scent the air. Enticing gates and arbors beckon you onward, through a succession of intimate garden rooms. A “tequila cantina” anchors the rear garden with a party-ready set-up and a tequila-bottle bottle tree.

I long ago fell under the spell of Lucinda’s El Jardin Encantador. Perhaps you will too. Come along with me for a tour.

First of all, you can see she owns the cutest house in the world. Painted purple with lavender trim and a rosy-mango door, its arched frame accented with tiles, the house announces that someone with a zest for life lives here.

The front yard is given over to a flowery cottage garden filled with roses, annuals, and native perennials. There’s no lawn except for a narrow, grassy path near the front door.

The promised angel’s trumpets (Brugmansia) were indeed gorgeous. I inhaled their residual sweet scent left over from the evening.

Lucinda is growing sweet peas this year, and they smelled heavenly too.

A closer look at the sweet peas

And another view of the angel’s trumpets

Buttery roses—’Julia Child’ was one—make a sunny backdrop to the sweet peas.

Star jasmine (Trachelospermum jasminoides) in bloom added another sweet scent to the garden. You can see it behind this white-winged dove, which alit on the birdbath and posed for a photo.

A small angel kneels among salvias and snapdragons.

Yellow snapdragons lit up a partly shaded area under a ginkgo tree, one of a few I’ve encountered in Austin.

Sancho the cat lounged on a purple garden seat.

A wider view of the garden reveals an enormous Jerusalem sage (Phlomis fruticosa) in full bloom.

Along the left side of the lot is a gravel drive, which no longer leads to the detached garage in the back yard. It stops short, blocked by a stone wall over which heartleaf ice plant (Aptenia cordifolia) cascades and a peaked, wooden arbor supporting a ‘Don Juan’ rose.

An intricate iron gate offers peek-a-boo glimpses of the garden beyond.

I adore this gate! Now we’ve walked through, and here’s a look back, with the front garden abloom in the background.

Another view, with nasturtiums tumbling along the ground

In the very back of her lot, behind her former garage, Lucinda created a festive cantina for her frequent parties. A rustic table serves as a bar, sheltered by an arbor constructed of unpeeled cedar posts topped with a metal agave. On the turquoise wall, a wooden sign proclaims this to be “La Lucinda Cantina.” At left, a tequila bottle tree is mulched with corks, and metal mariachis play. Horseshoes line the eave for luck.

What a perfect setting for Lucinda to show off her brand-new book, Viva Tequila! Cocktails, Cooking, and Other Agave Adventures, soon to be released in May. By the way, if you want to hear the always entertaining Lucinda speak about her new book—and her agave adventures—plan to attend the Garden Club of Austin’s May 23rd meeting, 7 pm, at Zilker Botanical Garden.

I got a sneak peek. It’s a beautiful book!

And the cantina is awfully fun, isn’t it?

Lucinda is bold with color, painting even her wooden privacy fence to festive effect. Here’s her mermaid garden, with blue and green capiz shells creating a watery curtain behind a metal fish and a preening mermaid. Snake plant (Sansevieria) and succulents like ‘Sticks on Fire’ euphorbia add to the wavy, under-the-sea vignette.

Lucinda created this mosaic Madonna altar out of an old bathtub and mortared it into a stone wall.

Mexican folk art is prominently displayed throughout her garden.

These are children’s chairs from Mexico, turned into an artistic collection along an orange wall of her house.

A closer look

In front of her former garage, Lucinda built a large raised bed over her old driveway and planted edibles and more roses.

Silverware flowers pick up the edible theme with a touch of whimsy.

A wider view

An eye-catching flower. This is some sort of African daisy, Lucinda said. Update: This is an Osteospermum hybrid, perhaps ‘Soprano Lilac Spoon’ by Proven Winners.

Aren’t they cool?

This is the dining deck immediately behind the house. A purple umbrella shades the table and cushy chairs. It always amazes me how many distinct garden rooms Lucinda was able to carve out of her tiny lot. And the beauty of it is that they make her garden live much larger than you’d expect.

A frilly metal chair stands by the door to her detached office, where she writes and prepares for her many speaking engagements.

A heart-shaped pad on a spineless prickly pear—Mother Nature’s own valentine?

My thanks to Lucinda for another delightful garden visit! Readers, if you’d like to see more of Lucinda’s festive garden, check out my previous posts:
Lucinda Hutson’s Easter-egg colorful garden, April 2012
Enchanted evening in Lucinda Hutson’s cantina garden, April 2011
El Jardin Encantador: Lucinda Hutson’s garden, October 2009
Lucinda Hutson’s enchanting garden, April 2008

All material © 2006-2013 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

What do you expect to see when you visit a desert garden? Cactus, of course, in all its architectural, spiny splendor. I recently attended the annual Garden Writers Association Symposium, held this year in Tucson, Arizona. We were bused to three private gardens, along with various community gardens and the Tucson Botanical Garden. Boy, did they all deliver on the cactus! We saw marvelously outlandish specimens at every turn, from the iconic saguaro to rotund barrels to Mickey Mouse-eared Opuntia. It was in many ways a profoundly foreign landscape, even though we can grow many spiky species here in Austin too.

Alan Richards’s garden also delivered on something I don’t see much of in greener Austin: jolts of color on walls and benches, from the chalky hues of a box of pastels to the saturated jewel tones of a royal treasury. The intense sunlight, which so beautifully illuminates the spiny or hairy sun-protective coats on the native flora, meets its match in colors like these, which refuse to wash out or fade into the background. They look even more vibrant in contrast to the mostly evergreen plants and tan, rocky soil. Plus the stately, formidably armed plants just beg to be highlighted against a brightly colored wall. If I lived in the desert, I would definitely have a colored wall against which to show off my plants.

I can’t quite see it working in Austin, but isn’t this smashing in the bold desert garden?

This low wall functions as a bench or pedestal for a display of found art.

The front garden is enclosed by golden-yellow walls and packed densely with arid-loving plants. The floor of the garden is a sandy rock, which also makes up the paths, delineated by rounded rocks.

Juxtaposing different shapes is a time-honored design principle, and it works just as well in a desert garden.

Tucson is located in the Sonoran Desert, which is considered an arboreal and relatively lush desert. The owner and designer, Alan Richards, has planted a number of airy trees for shade and vertical interest. From the front door, you essentially view the garden through a screen of fine-textured, leafy foliage.

There’s even a tall pine tree! Not what I expected to see in the desert. How about you?

The blue, symmetrical rosette of this agave echoes the blue of the bench pillows.

Ocotillo in leaf is yellow-green, which looks lovely alongside those golden walls.

Agave, prickly pear, and a yucca-like plant that I’m not able to ID.

By the door, close to a watering can, there’s even space for colorful marigolds. They look charming in this cobalt-blue pot.

The back garden seems even more lush, and there are welcome areas of shade thanks to numerous small trees.

Sandy paths that reminded me of beach paths through dunes wind through the garden, creating an enticement to explore. The lush plants keep you from seeing everything at once.

Here and there intimate seating areas are tucked under the shade of an airy tree.

In a more open, sunny spot, columnar cactus and Opuntia frame a lovely turquoise-bowl water feature.

Scrap metal becomes sculpture, elevated by its placement atop a low wall.

Plants become sculpture too, like this stunning agave in a matching turquoise pot.

The play of light across its leaves highlights their toothy edges.

An elemental sculpture, like something Georgia O’Keefe might have painted, is displayed on another of those fabulous colored walls.

Like javelins on a playing field, these long poles stand at angles and glint blue and gold in the sunlight. This is a sculptural work that you must walk through, placed as they are in the sandy path.

Looking more closely, you see that the necks of wine bottles have been stacked along the poles, making a sort of bottle ocotillo, rather than a bottle tree.

Another one stands behind the bowl fountain, echoing the vertical lines of the cactus.

A water feature, even a small one like this, is a welcome oasis in a desert garden. I bet birds love to bathe in it, standing on the river stones that fill most of the bowl.

Bees are happy here too.

As was I, loving the bold forms of the plants and the way the fine-textured ones hold the light.

For a look back at my first post about going to the GWA symposium, click here. Coming up next: A visit to Lorien Tersey’s DreamFlower Garden.

All material © 2006-2012 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

I’m continuing my sneak preview of the upcoming Inside Austin Gardens Tour, hosted by the Travis County Master Gardeners. In my last post I showed you Donnis Doyle’s colorful, whimsical garden. This garden belongs to her next-door neighbors, Ann and Robin Matthews, and they’ve been friends and neighbors for nearly 40 years. The Matthews got started on their garden first, and then Donnis followed suit, and the two gardens riff on each other nicely.

The Matthews’ front-yard garden is lawn free, with decomposed-granite paths winding through curved beds filled with native and largely xeric plants. They favor electric blue accents, like this painted table-and-chair set, positioned behind a screen of plants for privacy while still allowing them to enjoy their front garden and say hi to the neighbors. A swath of Gregg’s mistflower (Conoclinium greggii) blankets the foreground, and you know this attracts swarms of butterflies on warm days.

Sotol (Dasylirion texana) and red-flowering lantana are tough, drought-tolerant survivors—and beautiful too.

The Matthews incorporate a lot of rock into their garden, but it’s not a boring sea of just one kind. They use decomposed granite for paths, light gravel for accent areas, and river rock for decorative touches, like this spiral.

They humorously embrace flaws, like this long crack in their concrete driveway, and turn them into fun features. They filled the crack with a river of blue glass beads, and a nearby sign advises, “When life gives you cracks, make rivers!”

Another look at the front patio. You can see neighbor Donnis’s blue-bottle-and-coffee-mug arch in the background. A friendly path connects the two gardens.

Robin and Ann are serious about collecting rainwater from their roof. When they installed a large cistern directly in front of the house, Robin built this screen of wooden posts and metal pipes to support a star jasmine vine. It screens the cistern so well I didn’t notice it until Robin pointed it out.

Sotol and esperanza (Tecoma stans), with another glimpse of Donnis’s house behind. Notice that she has a screen along the front of her house that echoes the screen Robin made to hide his cistern.

From the corner of the house, looking across the front garden. Isn’t this a nicer view to walk out to than a flat, boring lawn?

Jewels of Opar (Talinum paniculatum) in front of Gregg’s mistflower

More water-collection tanks, which the Matthews have decoratively painted. This will be the garden to see if you want info on harvesting rainwater.

The back garden opens spaciously, with a gravel patio extension providing spillover room for entertaining and eliminating the mowing and watering needs of a lawn.

The back of the property is more wooded, and a colorful bench and lattice arbor provide a sheltered spot to enjoy the view. A curtained faux window made with a mirror brightens up the shady space and creates the illusion of more garden behind.

I love this blue arbor looking onto a circular herb garden anchored in the center with an exuberant blue bottle tree festooned with party lights.

What a cool focal point this must be at night.

Colorful garden decor

Raised beds for vegetables along the back fence

Another view of the herb garden and blue arbor, looking back toward the house

Where the Matthews needed privacy along one side of their yard, they built a faux-stone pictograph wall that represents actual Native American pictographs, which these former schoolteachers have an interest in.

Other Southwestern accents include this metal lizard and cactus-and-succulent planting dish…

…as well as this clever homemade spiral made from metal tubing.

I like that the Matthews made a photo display of the evolution of their garden, which is easier to view on a tour than a photo album. Plus it shows that a garden doesn’t just happen overnight. When they were younger and busier with work, they didn’t have much time for gardening, but as their kids grew up they started making gardens, and in retirement they found time to really transform their yard into a personal retreat.

Tour Info
Date: October 20
Time: 9 am to 4 pm
Tickets for the tour (all of the gardens) are $15 in advance, or $20 on the day of the tour ($5 for individual gardens).

Gardening Demonstrations/Education Sessions at the Matthews Garden (same as for the Doyle garden since they are next door to each other)
9:30 am – A Fest for Wildlife with Valerie Bugh
10:15 am – Austin Grows! with Jake Stewart
11:30 am – Unconventional Landscape Snacks – Collecting and Cooking Insects with Wizzie Brown
1:30 pm – Planning an Edible Landscape with Sheryl Williams
All Day – The Wall Trip DVD by Ann and Robin Matthews

For a look back at my post about the colorful Doyle Garden, click here. Tomorrow join me for a tour of the herb-a-licious Studebaker Garden.

All material © 2006-2012 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.