Each week in October, which is Support Your Independent Nursery Month, I am featuring one of my favorite Austin-area nurseries here at Digging. To make things even more interesting, I’m also hosting a giveaway every week—one from each nursery! This week I’m shining a spotlight on Barton Springs Nursery.

Why do I love to shop at Barton Springs Nursery? I listen to my cart, of course! And whenever I’m pulling it around BSN, my cart says things like, “Ooh, look! There’s that ______ (fill in the blank with whatever cool native plant you are looking for) you’ve been wanting to try, and they have it in an affordable 4-inch pot size. Grab three of those!” And “Let’s take a detour down the vine aisle. You might see something that’ll be perfect for greening up your fence.” And “Let’s not forget to check out the dyckia selection since you’re into those now.” You see? My cart knows what I want, even before I do. Plus it totes all my plants around.

And if my cart and I encounter a plant we’re not familiar with, or I’m just popping in to look for something in particular, the friendly, knowledgeable staff members—like Megan and Dora—are always willing to help. The staff will never just say, “Uh, I don’t know,” in answer to a question. They know a lot about the plants they sell, and if they don’t know the answer they’ll find out for you. A great staff is second only to a great plant selection, and BSN has both.

BSN propagates a lot of the plants it sells, which helps them to keep prices low. Native and well-adapted plants are its specialty.

The aisles are inviting and well-stocked.

And everything is clearly labeled with the common name, botanical name, size, and growing information. You can get a great tutorial on plants for our area just by reading the labels. Prices are written on the gallon-sized pots, and there are set prices for 4-inch pot sizes, so you never have to wonder how much something costs.

They have a great selection of pots, especially if you like bronze-colored ones, as I do.

This big palm greets you as you walk in, and in fact they do carry a nice selection of palms, including our native dwarf palmetto.

Photo courtesy of BSN
Ro, one of the staff members, having fun while she works.

Even if I come in for something particular, I nearly always peruse the entire nursery (just to see if anything catches my eye, you know). I always end up in the succulent and cactus section in the very back.

Just look at those shapely plants…

…and those fabulous gray, cube-shaped pots.

I like blue pots too.

Inside the garden shop you’ll find seasonal bulbs for sale, seeds, and tools, as well as beautiful accessories for the home and garden. Whether plants, gifts, or information about plants, you’ll find what you’re looking for at Barton Springs Nursery. To read more about this excellent nursery, check out an earlier post I wrote about BSN.

Photo of Joe courtesy of BSN

Now for the giveaway! Barton Springs Nursery is giving away a package worth $125—their Fall Power Pack—to one of my lucky readers! Here’s the scoop from Mae at Barton Springs Nursery:

Fall Power Pack (Packs a Texas-Sized Punch!)
Our goody bag is comprised of a sampling of great products that will benefit any soils or plants that are lucky enough to receive them. Use a combination of these staff-recommended products to ensure a quickly established, healthy root system and an overall more robust garden! Ask one of our helpful salespeople how and when they suggest using these goods when you come in to Support Your Local Nursery! The Fall Power Pack contains:

Barton Springs Nursery T-Shirt: An Austin original since 1986. Be as stylish as one of our hard-working staff members.
Gardenville Potting Soil: A locally crafted, organic soil mix, great for container gardening and starting seedlings.
Bio-tone Starter Plus: An organic fertilizer, loaded with beneficial microbes, proven to help new plants establish faster. It will increase root mass to avoid transplant loss, as well as increase shoot growth and bloom count. Use at time of planting to ensure success.
Maxicrop Seaweed Plus Iron: A unique combination of pure seaweed extract with readily sequestered iron in an easy-to-use liquid form. This high-iron formulated product, when sprayed directly onto foliage or applied as a root drench, will prevent yellowing of leaves.
Superthrive: World-famous horticultural vitamins/hormones solution. Recommended for transplanting and growing, and as a plant activator and reviver.
Rabbit Hill Farm Minerals Plus: An organic mineral soil amendment which contains three types of paramagnetic volcanic rock, and trace minerals. If your soil is lacking minerals, Minerals Plus is the product for you.
Medina Hasta Gro Plant Food: A biologically based soil conditioner/natural fertilizer. Contains high-quality N-P-K plant food plus Medina Soil Activator to stimulate biological activity, HuMate humic acid to improve the soil structure, and seaweed extracts to stimulate fruiting and blooming.
Medina Grow Green 4-2-3 Organic Fertilizer: A granular fertilizer that is a natural plant food for all of your gardening needs. Slow-release to feed grass, flowerbeds, and gardens for up to 4 months.

That sounds like a great package to win! Just leave a comment on this post to enter, and I’ll announce the winner at the end of the week. Update 10/14: Click to see the winner announcement.

Giveaway Rules:
1. You must leave a comment on this post to enter.
2. Only one entry per person is allowed.
3. Giveaway ends at 11:59 pm on October 13th.
4. I’ll announce the winner on October 14th.
5. The winner must go to the nursery with a photo ID to claim the prize within two weeks of winning. Prizes will not be mailed.
6. The winner is not eligible to win any other giveaways at Digging for 2012′s Support Your Independent Nursery Month.

Remember, win or lose, if you live here in Austin you’ve already hit the jackpot with a great selection of local nurseries at which to shop, learn, and be inspired.

Disclosure: I’ve posted about this nursery because it’s one I shop at regularly and recommend to others. I invited the owner/manager to participate in a giveaway for my readers, but my post was not conditional on any donation. Plain and simple: I like this nursery and think you will too.

All material © 2006-2012 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

My friend Curt Arnette, the talented landscape architect at Sitio Design and plant lover whose personal garden I visited in May, designed this contemporary gravel garden for a Westlake client, and I recently got to take a peek.

The lot is wooded and steeply sloped and the house is large, so the front garden is really just a narrow, sunny strip that runs alongside the front of the house, visually sharing space with a driveway running uphill to a parking area on the left side of the house. Curt broke up a potential mass of concrete by using multiple, smaller slabs separated by dark-gray gravel.

A lawn would have been a waste in such a narrow area, especially one that must incorporate walkways to the front door, the parking area to the left, and a gate to the side yard on the right side of the house. So Curt planted desert plants and dry-loving grasses—plus a few thirstier bamboo for verticality and lush, evergreen foliage—directly in the gravel.

Mexican feathergrass (Nassella tenuissima) and Agave parryi var. truncata

A trio of three different-height Yucca rostrata

Agave salmiana (I think)

A multi-slab poured-concrete path at the far right leads to a horizontal-slat fence and gate.

Pass through the gate and you enter a small, partly shady side garden with palms, bamboo muhly, asparagus fern, and inland sea oats. Here we are looking back at the gate to the front garden.

Moving forward, you see a narrow, sloped side yard, which is terraced to make room for a pool and a small patio at the far end.

A narrow raised bed, set off with steel edging, hugs the foundation and softens the paving.

Burgundy dyckia and a frosty blue aloe

Some sort of bromeliad? I wish I’d asked about this one.

Heading back to the front of the house you see a stair of steel risers and gravel treads leading up to the parking area on the left. A Corten steel box planter steps down the slope and helps define the separation between the garden and the driveway.

Small grasses, agaves, and a giant heseraloe (Hesperaloe funifera) are planted directly into the gravel steps! I wish I’d asked Curt what the shrub is on the left.

A closer examination of the Corten planter reveals a nice assortment of soap aloe (Aloe maculata), dyckia, and silver ponyfoot. Behind the soap aloe is a young ‘Sharkskin’ agave.

Lovely combo of wine-colored dyckia and silver ponyfoot (Dichondra argentea). Not all dyckias are winter-hardy in Austin, so if you try to replicate this look, choose one that is. ‘Burgundy Ice’ is reputed to be hardy for us.

Spiky! ‘Sharkskin’ agave and soap aloes

A wider view of the gravel-and-steel steps. Isn’t this lovely? A study in gray-green. I’m not sure why the steel risers are gray while the planter boxes are the trademark rust color of Corten. Just a design choice, I suppose.

Burgundy dyckias and what looks like a young ‘Whale’s Tongue’ agave (A. ovatifolia) grow on the right side of the steps. The homeowner will eventually need to transplant certain plants, like this agave, when they begin to outgrow their location. But that’s the nature of a garden.

At the top of the rise, by the garage, a bamboo and potted dioon (I think) add elegant evergreen texture.

Looking back down the stair, you see a giant hesperaloe parked on the top step. Why am I not growing one of these?

A wider view from the top of the drive shows how the house is tucked into the sloping, live oak-shaded lot. Bamboo muhly (Muhlenbergia dumosa) cascades over the wall on the left, softening the concrete with its feathery texture.

While the garden is quite small, it packs a big punch for those who admire contemporary, clean-lined design and a surprising wealth of fascinating plants packed into it.

All material © 2006-2012 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

August is a waiting game for central Texas gardeners—waiting for fall rains to arrive, waiting for the muggy blanket of heat to lift and a cool breeze to blow in from the north, waiting for nurseries to fill up with their fall shipments of new plants, waiting for October, the beginning of our best planting season.

Yesterday we got a teaser of fall goodness, with rain showers and a cooling cloud cover. Between showers I went out to look at the sodden garden and pull a few weeds from the softened decomposed granite, and I snapped these pics to remind myself of how much everything has grown this summer, even though at this point in summer the plants don’t look their best. Pictured above is my neighbor’s streetside garden, which I designed and planted to blend with mine. We share a decomposed-granite path that runs between our garden beds.

Here’s how it looked right after I planted it in early February.

And even before that. Now it’s a lawn-gone garden, and in another month or so the salvias and grasses will burst into fall bloom.

Panning to the right, to my own streetside garden, you see a ‘Pink Flamingos’ muhly grass that’ll be blooming in another month or so. (According to Plant Delights, ‘Pink Flamingos’ is a hybrid, from Peckerwood Garden, of Muhlenbergia capillaris and Muhlenbergia lindheimeri.) Behind it is an expanse of shady St. Augustine lawn that I plan to convert into a simple Berkeley sedge lawn. But first I need to have a retaining wall built up by the house, and that’ll have to wait for a while.

Garlic chives are blooming along the curb—yay, a sign that summer is on the wane!

And this eryngium that I grew from seed shared with me by Michael at Plano Prairie Garden is starting to “purple up”—another sign of fall.

The island garden—a live oak-studded berm that was marooned by the circular drive when the house was built—is wearing the tawny shades of a long, hot summer, but plenty of silvers are there to cool things off visually. Year-round structure is provided by ‘Color Guard’ yuccas, a wavy-leafed spineless prickly pear (shared by Jean of Dig, Grow, Compost, Blog), and a big softleaf yucca. Without them, the garden would be a blurry mass of fine-leaved perennials and grasses.

I simply adore the ‘Color Guard’ yuccas. But the plant I get asked about by every person who stops to look at the garden is the silver-blue gopher plant (Euphorbia rigida). Do the deer bother it, they ask? Only once—the irritating latex sap inside the stems taught them to leave it alone. The gardener needs to use caution as well—i.e., gloves and maybe eye protection—when trimming it.

To appreciate how much this garden has grown in 2-1/2 years, here’s how it looked in March 2010, right after planting.

And before that—just tangled Asian jasmine, purple lantana, and a few scraggly nandinas. Easy-care, certainly, and nothing wrong with that, but it was not going to satisfy this plant-a-holic.

Let’s see—other gardens in transition. Here’s the brand-new gravel garden by the front door. An ‘Alphonse Karr’ clumping bamboo hides some pipes in the left corner. Mexican bush sage (Salvia leucantha) will add purple flower spikes on the right in another month. Agave gentryi ‘Jaws’ occupies the circular planter, toothless sotol (Dasylirion longissimum) the pipe planter. I found the tall, green pot on sale at Natural Gardener recently and plan to add a ‘Red Star’ cordyline. The little pot in front contains a pretty but vicious dyckia.

But what the heck is going on in the deck bed? (This is the view straight down from the deck.) I have struggled with this space for four years. At first it was a dumping ground for many of the sun-loving plants I brought with me from my previous garden. And then I realized that it didn’t have enough sun for many of them—doh!—but it did seem to get blistering part-sun, so shade-appreciative plants suffered. I’m happy with the recent semicircle of ‘Color Guard’ yucca that echoes the lines of the curving path around the stock-tank pond. But the mishmash of flowering perennials and a few holding-bed agaves behind the yuccas is just a mess. I think I’m going to move all those this fall and plant a curving line of yellow-green bamboo muhly to echo the yuccas.

Nearby, the ‘Blue Ice’ Arizona cypress is simply stunning. I can’t believe how much it’s grown since I planted it three years ago.

Here’s how it looked then. Whenever you think nothing’s happening out there, it pays to look at old photos.

So are you making fall garden plans too?

All material © 2006-2012 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.