A garden with your coffee at Cosmic Saltillo
February 24, 2024 For a few years, I’ve been wanting to visit Cosmic, a coffee shop and beer garden in South Austin, mainly for its garden-like landscaping (featured on Central Texas Gardener). But I just haven’t made it down there yet. Then last year, I heard about a new Cosmic ...
I’m writing for Better Homes & Gardens magazine about Texas garden
June 19, 2023 Who needs inspiration for making a garden that beats the heat? Um yeah, every Texas gardener — and every other hot-summer gardener too. You’ll find great design moves in Lorie and Michael Kinler’s Fort Worth garden, which I wrote about for Better Homes & Gardens magazine. My ...
Learn how to choose the right plants from Austin designer Mark Word
January 30, 2023 Photo: Nicole Mlakar/Tribeza, courtesy of Mark Word Garden Spark, my in-person speaker series about garden design, concludes its successful 6th season on February 23th with a presentation by acclaimed Austin designer Mark Word, principal at Word + Carr Design Group. Mark will show us how to think through ...
Designer Nick McCullough shares American Roots at Garden Spark
January 28, 2023 Austin garden lovers and designers turned out for Garden Spark on a chilly Thursday evening to hear Columbus-based designer Nick McCullough. Nick has a huge fan following across the U.S. and shared inspiring images and the stories of the gardens from his new book American Roots. I ...
One-of-a-kind design on the 2023 Tribeza Interiors Tour, Part 2
January 26, 2023 I’m so glad Austin’s excellent Tribeza Interiors Tour is back after a 2-year pandemic hiatus. On Sunday’s tour day, I managed to see all 7 of the featured houses, plus squeeze in a picnic lunch courtesy of my touring partner, in the 5 hours allotted to the ...
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 ...
Read This: American Roots
December 03, 2022 A couple of years ago British gardening TV personality Monty Don made a 3-part series about U.S. gardens to answer the question, “What is an American garden?” Turns out, it’s an impossible question to answer satisfactorily in a country that spans a continent, 13 hardiness zones, and ...
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 ...
Garden Spark kicks off 6th season with exciting new speakers
August 10, 2022 Garden Spark returns for its 6th season on September 22, kicking off a new series of entertaining speakers — garden designers, authors, landscape architects — who’ll be sharing their expertise and ideas at in-person events here in Austin. This season we’ll be inspired to reclaim our front ...
New pipe planters create a focal point in front garden
June 20, 2022 Me and my pipe planters! I have three new pipe planters in my front garden, which I installed last fall (pre-house painting) but never got around to sharing, thanks to all the New England-down-to-Virginia travel posts I slathered on the blog. (My fellow heat-wave sufferers, click the ...
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 ...
A Texas-style crevice garden – and neighborly collaboration – brings midcentury Austin home to vibrant life
January 18, 2022 At the end of October, when Loree of Danger Garden was in town for her Garden Spark talk, we finagled an invitation to the tropicalesque garden of John Ignacio. John in turn introduced us to his friend and neighbor Coleson Bruce, who kindly allowed a couple of ...
Garden design lessons from a Texas gravel garden
November 10, 2021 Blue grama grass and whale’s tongue agave I’m always inspired by Linda Peterson’s low-water gravel garden in San Antonio, which normally is studded with gigantic Weber agaves, sculptural prickly pears, rivers of starfish-shaped soap aloes, and strategic screening shrubs that soften fencing and create a green backdrop ...
Garden bed evolution and a newly named agave
August 21, 2021 It’s taken over a year, but this corner bed below the deck is finally moving in a good direction. For several years this space was filled with a frothy cloud of bamboo muhly — fine for a hedge or background planting, but I didn’t want a monolithic ...
Redesigning a boring side garden and shading a patio
May 12, 2021 Side garden after replanting I got rid of all the lawn years ago — a big design move — but a garden isn’t static. Years later a space often needs a redesign if it’s become overgrown or certain plants haven’t performed as expected. And sometimes things just ...
Read This: Striking Succulent Gardens
March 09, 2021 After the prolonged deep freeze that Texas endured last month, which reduced our beloved agaves and other succulents to oozing mush and browned nearly everything else back to the roots, it may not seem…timely…for a Texan to review a book about succulent gardening. But it would be ...
