Exploring Portal Potty and more at Creek Show 2022
November 20, 2022 A chilly drizzle on Friday couldn’t keep me from seeing Waterloo Greenway’s Creek Show, an “annual display of illuminated art” along the banks of downtown Austin’s Waller Creek. I go every year with family or friends to explore the creative light sculptures. Last year’s Creek Show abandoned ...
Cynthia Deegan’s free-spirited, collected home and garden
November 01, 2022 The mossy green doors of Cynthia Deegan’s milagro-spangled garden gate opened to me again a week or so ago, when she generously invited me and Garden Spark speaker Teri Speight to come on over. What a treat to follow up our visit to Lucinda’s garden with Cynthia’s! ...
Lucinda’s Day of the Dead altars, a celebration of departed loved ones
October 30, 2022 Austin icon Lucinda Hutson‘s festive garden is always a joy to visit. But for the Mexican holiday Day of the Dead, she pulls out all the stops in her decorating. Smiling skeletons dangle from trees, gates, umbrellas, and the front porch. At night, purple lights give an ...
Native plant landscaping at ACC Highland Campus, the new home of Central Texas Gardener
October 26, 2022 Teri Speight doing a Central Texas Gardener studio taping Last week, when author Teri Speight was in Austin to give a Garden Spark talk, I accompanied her to a taping at the new Central Texas Gardener studio at Austin PBS. Producer Linda Lehmusvirta had announced CTG’s move ...
Field of Light by Bruce Munro glows at the Wildflower Center
October 12, 2022 Moonrise over Field of Light at the Wildflower Center Silhouetted black trees under a nearly full Hunter’s Moon last Saturday gave a unique Central Texas flavor to British artist Bruce Munro‘s light installation, Field of Light, at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. I’d purchased tickets for ...
Have we outlasted the heat-wave summer?
August 31, 2022 What a summer this has been for Austin. Hot as Hades, rainless and parched for months and months. And then, finally, flooding rains in mid-August drenched parts of the city — I got 4.75 inches over a few days, although friends in South and West Austin got ...
A garden on wheels and colorful decor convert driveway into patio garden
August 03, 2022 When you arrive at a purple Victorian-style house on a Rainbow Row, with a dozen planetary-painted bowling balls tucked amid foundation ferns and coleus, accented by jewel-toned bottles on a bottle tree — well, you know you’re in for a tour of a fearless color-lover’s garden. Such ...
Hot summer garden before it got super hot
June 29, 2022 I returned yesterday from the Madison Garden Bloggers Fling, and I’m already missing Wisconsin’s cooler summer climate. But dark clouds greeted me when I got home and then RAIN! An inch fell on my parched and heat-stressed garden, refreshing everything and sparing me from having to do ...
In the night garden
June 06, 2022 The night garden in early summer glows with spires of creamy, bell-shaped blossoms. ‘Bright Edge’ yucca sends up these towers of flowers, perfect for a moonlight garden. Paleleaf yucca (Y. pallida) gets in on the act too, sending up its own tall flower spike over powder-blue leaves ...
Zilker Garden turns surreal after dark with fantastical neon art
April 25, 2022 Last Friday my husband and I decked ourselves out in floral clothing and headed to Zilker Botanical Garden to attend The Surreal Garden, an interactive neon-art event. I have to say, it was even more fun than I’d imagined. Fantastical neon light sculptures filled the gardens (mainly ...
Blue trees in Austin’s Pease Park spotlight tree loss around the world
April 11, 2022 If you’ve visited Kingsbury Commons at Austin’s Pease Park lately, you may have encountered a startling and surprisingly beautiful sight: clusters of trees with Majorelle blue trunks and limbs. The Blue Trees is a temporary environmental art installation by New Zealand artist Konstantin Dimopoulos. It brings our ...
I painted my brick house white for a fresh look
March 12, 2022 Let me join the throngs of bloggers writing about painting dated brick houses white or off-white. After years of mulling it over, we took the leap of painting our brick a few weeks ago, and I’m loving the fresh, clean, more modern look. Before Since moving into ...
Fortlandia wrapping up at the Wildflower Center
January 10, 2022 With Fortlandia ending soon at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, my daughter and I popped over last week to check out the annual installation of creative, nature-themed, designer-made forts. This year at least one of the forts is also lit up at night as part of ...
Houston Botanic Garden brightens the holidays with Lightscape
December 27, 2021 Space City finally got its own botanical garden last fall, the terrific new Houston Botanic Garden, which I visited right after it opened. Since then it’s survived an unprecedented freeze during Texas’s February snowpocalypse and appears to have bounced back with vigor. But my return visit, on ...
The yellow glow of late fall
December 02, 2021 Cool, blue-sky weather has me spending more time in the garden, having friends over, and tinkering with planting beds. It’s kind of glowing out there. Why? Yellow is the color of fall in my garden, starting with the wonderful forsythia sage (Salvia madrensis), which lights up the ...
Creek Show 2021 lights up spacious new Waterloo Park
November 17, 2021 After a covid hiatus last year, Waterloo Greenway‘s fantastical Creek Show — light-sculpture installations by local designers — has returned, and it’s better than ever. The illuminated art lights up Austin’s newly overhauled Waterloo Park nightly through November 21. We reserved our free tickets weeks ago (it’s ...
