Wildflower-palooza at Ruthie Burrus Garden, part 1
April 30, 2022 I first photographed Ruthie Burrus’s garden 8 years ago, when she emailed an invitation to come visit. I was wowed by her wildflower meadow, textural foliage garden at the front door, giant rainwater cisterns, charmingly rustic garden haus, and skyline view. Here’s her garden haus in spring ...
Piet Oudolf meadow in fall bloom at Delaware Botanic Gardens
March 15, 2022 The last public garden I visited on my road trip down the East Coast last October was newly opened Delaware Botanic Gardens in Dagsboro, Delaware. The big draw? A 2-acre meadow designed by revered Dutch plantsman Piet Oudolf, who also designed the plantings of the High Line ...
Flowery meadow instead of lawn at Chanticleer’s house garden
February 26, 2022 You’d expect a garden surrounding an estate house to be formal, restrained, with neat lawns and containers that serve to frame the grand structure. The house garden at Chanticleer, a Pennsylvania “pleasure garden” I visited during my East Coast road trip last October, upends this convention through ...
Gravel garden at Chanticleer reminds me of Texas
February 21, 2022 Whether you love plants, exciting planting combos, design and gardening artistry, or overlooks and hideaways to sit and enjoy a beautiful garden, Chanticleer has it all. Located near Philadelphia, Chanticleer dubs itself “a pleasure garden,” and it’s been my favorite public garden since I first visited in ...
Autumn meadows and monarchs at Wildflower Center
February 07, 2022 The Center’s iconic lookout tower, which doubles as a water-collecting cistern When Loree of Danger Garden came to Austin last October, we visited the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center on her last day. I was happy she got to see it a second time, particularly since her ...
Neighbors save 11 acres from condo development, create a public nature park
January 27, 2022 As Texas’s population soars, many communities are feeling the growing pains of rapid development. Here in booming Austin that manifests as condos, condos, condos and traffic, traffic, traffic. But smaller towns also feel the pinch, not least in terms of lost green space. In Horseshoe Bay, a ...
James Golden’s Federal Twist garden is like Fight Club, except we do talk about it
January 22, 2022 At the garden gate, towering grasses make you feel about 3 feet tall Plants duke it out for space and sunlight in every garden. But at Federal Twist, a wet-meadow garden in a clearing in the woods near Stockton, New Jersey, you witness the brawling fistfight from ...
Anemones and autumn memories in Cat’s garden
January 12, 2022 Back in late October, when Loree of Danger Garden was visiting, Cat Jones invited us over for a garden visit. Her lipstick-pink anemones, a passalong from Rock Rose‘s Jenny Stocker (who’s since departed Austin for Arizona), were blooming. We both adore these fall flowers, which Jenny kindly ...
LongHouse Reserve weaves gardens and sculpture: Dune path, pavilion, and tropical rill
January 06, 2022 My visit to LongHouse Reserve on October 10, a cool, drizzly afternoon, was almost an afterthought. I’d detoured through the Hamptons on my Northeastern road trip largely to visit Madoo, garden of the late artist Robert Dash. With two days to fill in the Hamptons I did ...
At Bedrock Gardens art leads you on a journey
November 18, 2021 In early October, as we road-tripped south from our leaf-peeping week in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, I was head-over-heels excited to revisit Bedrock Gardens, a private-transitioning-to-public garden in the town of Lee. I first visited Bedrock Gardens in 2014, when the owners, Jill Nooney and Bob Munger, ...
Trolls, grasses, and a storybook children’s garden at Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens
November 03, 2021 We traveled north in early October to enjoy fall foliage in New Hampshire, stopping first in Maine for a couple of days. A garden on my must-see list: Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens, a 300-acre public garden in Boothbay. Here’s part 2 of my visit; click here for ...
Wild bighorn sheep and wildflowers in the Rocky Mountains
August 06, 2021 Bighorn sheep ewe and lamb Driving to Colorado from Austin entails two days of sitting in the car and letting the wide-open, arid landscape of West Texas and northern New Mexico fly by. Some people find it boring, but I don’t. I enjoy the vast landscape while ...
Maroon Bells hike through Colorado wildflowers
August 03, 2021 Texans flock to Colorado to escape summer’s heat, and we’ve made our share of road trips up through Boulder, Estes Park, Breckenridge, and Durango. But somehow we’d never been to Aspen. We remedied that oversight in mid-July, when the alpine meadows were quilted by colorful wildflowers. A ...
Tour of P. Allen Smith’s Moss Mountain Farm: Terrace Garden and Sister Oak
July 07, 2021 After St. Louis, Mom and I headed back to Texas via Little Rock, Arkansas. On the morning of June 17th, we wound our way into the hills northwest of the city and joined 80 others with a reservation for lunch and a tour of Moss Mountain Farm, ...
Modern ranch garden embraces water collection and wildflowers in New Braunfels
May 17, 2021 Last spring Cody and Michelle Koehler finished their garden installation at their home in New Braunfels, Texas. Less than a year later, February’s epic freeze killed most of their large specimen plants, including Weber agaves, olive and palo verde trees, and toothless sotol. Like everyone else in ...
Bluebonnet safari in Round Top and Brenham
April 16, 2021 I kept hearing that bluebonnets were a bit of a no-show in Central Texas this year due to a dry fall and winter, not because of the February freeze. Friends who’d gone west into the Hill Country looking for denim-blue fields came back disappointed, and my own ...
