Christmastime flowers and no freeze yet
December 24, 2023 Here it is Christmas, and Austin has so far escaped a hard freeze. That plus mild temps and occasional rain showers means flowers, flowers, flowers! Like Mexican flame vine (Senecio confusus) delivering punchy orange petals to the elevated deck. Giant ligularia (Farfugium japonicum ‘Gigantea’) glows with yellow daisies ...
Jenny Rose Carey’s playful garden rooms at Northview, part 2
November 06, 2023 In my last post I showed you half of Jenny Rose Carey’s garden, Northview, which I toured during the Philadelphia Area Fling in September. Today I’ll show you the rest. Let’s start with her Fruits and Flowers Garden, where this Tin Man sculpture greeted me with open ...
October blooms brighten my garden
October 12, 2023 October! It’s the best month of the year, providing sweet relief from a Texas summer with cooler weather and rain and bringing the garden back to life. Let’s take a stroll ALL around the garden and see what there is to see. It’s oxblood lily season! These ...
Making the scene at Create A Scene garden
October 11, 2023 In their home garden, Create A Scene, floral designer Michael Bowell and the artist Simple express their humor and place-making through plants and garden art. Their irreverent, enveloping garden in Malvern, Pennsylvania, was one of the stops on the Philadelphia Area Fling last month. Their plant-stuffed and ...
Twilight in Cat’s garden
August 29, 2023 A late-summer evening in my friend Cat‘s canyon-side garden is serene and lovely, as twilight hides the summer scorch all Texans are seeing in our gardens right now. This blistering summer has taught us to be crepuscular, more active at twilight, like deer. Cat knows how to ...
Hot summer survivors and new book news
August 21, 2023 This summer, y’all. Am I right, my fellow Texas gardeners? But even with two months of surface-of-the-sun temps and zero rain, at least a few plants are happy. Like this pink-flowering mammillaria cactus that burst into silken bloom a few days after I gave it a deep ...
A healing garden in West Texas
August 08, 2023 A week ago I had the pleasure of visiting a lovely garden in Alpine, located in far West Texas, 400 miles west of Austin. Owner Susan Wallens showed me around and told me how the garden came to be. Susan’s husband, Mike, is the vicar of St ...
Surviving the record-breaking heat
July 20, 2023 Heat waves are everywhere all at once right now, and Austin too is broiling in the hottest July on record, according to KXAN. That’s saying something because last summer was incredibly hot. I felt sure, after enduring Snowpocalypse, last summer’s oven-like temps, and then February’s Arbormageddon ice ...
Spikes and springtime
March 22, 2023 Spiderwort (Tradescantia occidentalis), a self-sowing native and a springtime beauty, continues to color my shady spaces purple. Its bee-feeding flowers open at dawn and close in the early afternoon, except on cool, cloudy days, when they may stay open all day. More flower spikes line the raised ...
Stock tank returns to the Circle Garden – as a planter!
January 18, 2023 Happy 2023! I’m back from a holiday blogging break, but during the past three weeks I wasn’t just baking, wrapping presents, hanging out with family, and putting away holiday decor. I’ve been outside. A lot. Ripping things up. In fact the cool months are my favorite season ...
Native plants and Hill Country style at Paula Stone’s Fredericksburg garden
October 25, 2022 Two Fridays ago a couple of friends and I drove out to Fredericksburg, a charming town in the Texas Hill Country, founded in the mid-1800s by German immigrants and built out of native limestone block, pressed-tin ceilings, and galvanized roofs. We’d been invited to visit by Paula ...
Back to the garden of good and evil
May 25, 2022 My friend Lori of The Gardener of Good and Evil is always in the middle of a project. I don’t know how she finds the time and energy after working on other people’s gardens all day, but Lori leaps into projects in all seasons, never shying away ...
Water feature magic in Lori Daul’s garden
January 24, 2022 My friend Lori Daul‘s garden in South Austin has evolved, over the many years I’ve visited, from a sunny, romantic space filled with roses to a shadier yet still lush paradise where bold blue agaves and black elephant ears get equal billing, where dry gardens meet water ...
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 ...
Wildflowers, water features, and flying pigs add charm to no-lawn garden in Cedar Park
June 10, 2021 Whenever I see a no-lawn, front-yard garden in suburbia, I know a daring and enthusiastic gardener lives there. Such is the case with Cedar Park homeowner Frances Fortanely, whose garden I had the pleasure of seeing last week. Pulling up to the curb, I was greeted by ...
Early spring blooms and Athena the owl at Wildflower Center
March 20, 2021 When they’re offered, I take advantage of late-admission hours to gardens. The light is better for photography in the early evening, and you have a better chance of seeing wildlife. On Thursday our local native-plant botanical garden, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, stayed open late, and ...
