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 ramble, Part 2: Woodland garden, Yoko Ono sculpture, and Red Garden
January 06, 2022 When textile-artist Jack Lenor Larsen created his garden at LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton, New York, one of his goals, according to online interviews, was to encourage people to be nonconformist. He wanted to show that more can be done with a suburban backyard than the typical ...
A collected home with heart at Via Libre garden
December 03, 2021 Known in Abilene for their extensive gardens, designer and artist Cynthia Williams Deegan and her husband, Bobby, picked up and moved to Austin in 2013 to be near their children and grandchildren. Austin has grown more enchanting as a result. As I’ve written previously, Cynthia and Bobby ...
Meeting up with “Gays Who Garden” Andrew and Jared
November 15, 2021 I can’t remember when I started following @gayswhogarden on Instagram, but their alliterative, cheeky, and decidedly out username caught my eye, as did their beautiful images of soft-petaled roses, colorful Texas wildflowers, and glowing dahlias (in Austin — how??). We started chatting online, and in due course ...
Lucinda Hutson’s colorful Day of the Dead garden
October 25, 2021 Austin author Lucinda Hutson‘s garden blazes with color every day of the year. But come October, for Day of the Dead, she kicks it up a big notch. Yellow and orange marigolds glow from every pot, mingling with hibiscus, coral vine, and roses in sherbet hues, all ...
Tour of P. Allen Smith’s home, vegetable garden, and rose garden at Moss Mountain Farm
July 09, 2021 Last month, on a garden-visiting road trip with my mom, I bought tickets for a farm lunch and tour at P. Allen Smith‘s Moss Mountain Farm, about 40 minutes north of Little Rock, Arkansas. Smith is a nationally known TV personality and garden designer, and the half-day ...
A passion for purple in Lucinda Hutson’s garden
April 22, 2021 Reveling in the flowery, herb-scented beauty of Lucinda Hutson‘s garden is always a delight, but especially this spring, after the devastating February freeze that set back every Texas garden. Lucinda’s garden was hit hard too, but thanks to her own nonstop cleanup and replanting, twice-weekly gardener assistance, ...
Early spring in Hyde Park cottage garden
February 09, 2021 Spring has arrived early at this sweet cottage garden in Austin’s Hyde Park neighborhood. I was passing by on Sunday when the dark-pink roses rambling along a picket fence caught my eye. A sunburst-shaped wheeler’s sotol (Dasylirion wheeleri) and clipped germander bush (Teucrium fruticans) add pretty foliage ...
Fall flowers, foliage, and change-ups
November 11, 2020 Ah fall, how I love you. Even though our fall weather is comparable to summer in northerly regions (low to mid-80s F), and colorful foliage rarely occurs, it’s still my favorite season. After all, autumn is our second spring here in Texas, and fall perennials like Philippine ...
In for a rose, out for a garden visit at Antique Rose Emporium
October 01, 2020 I passed through Brenham on the way home from Houston two weekends ago. Naturally, I stopped at The Antique Rose Emporium nursery, ostensibly to search for another ‘Icecap’ rose to replace one that croaked after the summer, but really to check out the gardens. They were in ...
Revamping the Circle Garden, again
July 29, 2020 The summer doldrums, I call it. When it feels like a sauna outside, and it won’t rain, and yet the plants and especially the weeds grow like Jack’s magical beanstalk until the garden feels suffocated by vegetation. That’s where I was a couple weeks ago, with tree ...
Back garden walkabout
April 24, 2020 Y’all may get weary of seeing my garden each week while I hole up at home during the pandemic. While I’m missing all the gardens I’m usually able to visit and photograph — and share here at Digging — I am enjoying the time spent in my ...
A little more room for pollinator plants
April 16, 2020 Taking out the stock-tank pond opened up a partly sunny spot in my shady garden. You can bet I wasn’t going to let that go to waste! Inside a new circle of diminutive ‘Micron’ hollies, which echo the form of ‘Winter Gem’ boxwoods at the entryways, I ...
Penstemon and passionflower
April 09, 2020 Spring bounds ahead as we confine ourselves at home, waiting for the corona specter to pass us by. I spent an unproductive couple of hours late last night googling how to cut my own hair and watching makeup tutorials promising to make me look 10 years younger ...
All cleaned up after live oak deluge
March 30, 2020 The garden reemerged last weekend, after copious raking and blowing and bagging, from the annual spring deluge of last season’s live oak leaves and subsequent pollen catkins. I ran around with the camera, capturing the gorgeousness of new flowers and fresh foliage, like this pretty combo of ...
Hilltop pollinator garden of Ruthie Burrus: Austin Open Day tour
November 20, 2019 Having visited Ruthie Burrus’s garden before (including at Austin Garden Bloggers Fling), I knew it would be one of my favorites on the Austin Open Days tour in November, sponsored by The Garden Conservancy. Let’s start with the entry garden, where a concrete trough softened by ferns ...
