Read This: The New Low-Maintenance Garden
November 12, 2009 The New Low-Maintenance Garden: How to Have a Beautiful, Productive Garden and the Time to Enjoy It, by Valerie Easton, photography by Jacqueline M. Koch (2009) Plant lovers may reject Valerie Easton’s very premise: that you can have a low-maintenance garden by making a “non-plant-centered garden,” one ...
October garden events in Austin: Save the dates!
October 06, 2009 October is a busy month for Austin gardeners. It’s prime planting season, the weather is cool enough to start those hardscaping projects we put off all summer, classes and presentations are happening left and right, and it’s garden-tour season again. Yippee! Mark your calendars and join me ...
The Perennial Care Manual giveaway: We have two winners!
August 31, 2009 ‘Irish Eyes’ rudbeckia My thanks to all the new gardeners who commented on my review of The Perennial Care Manual, an excellent new book by Nancy Ondra. As you may remember, I am giving away one copy to a local newbie gardener and one to a non-local ...
Book review & giveaway: The Perennial Care Manual
August 24, 2009 New gardeners will find The Perennial Care Manual, Nancy Ondra’s latest collaboration with photographer Rob Cardillo, to be an essential reference. Everything you need to know about planning, planting, and caring for a perennial garden is here. In Part 1, titled “Perennial Care Basics,” Ondra explains in ...
Read This: Designing with Succulents
August 08, 2009 When the Death Star trains its energy-sapping, plant-frying beam on central Texas each summer, I find inspiration in succulent gardens, which use heat-loving, water-thrifty agaves, aloes, cacti, and groundcover succulents to create a tapestry of colorful foliage. This summer I’ve been devouring the images and design ideas ...
Read This: The Hot Garden
April 14, 2009 “Get your desert eyes on,” Scott Calhoun urges in his new book The Hot Garden. In other words, see and appreciate the natural beauty of a country that is not lush, leafy, or green and that relies on rock and open space as much as plants for ...
Read This: Home Outside and Sunset Design Guides
April 06, 2009 As springtime sends you racing out into your yard, eager to create the garden you’ve been dreaming of all winter, publishers are releasing new design books seemingly daily to inspire, to educate, and to demystify the process. One of these is Julie Moir Messervy’s Home Outside: Creating ...
Native and Adapted Landscape Plants: An Austin gardening resource
February 20, 2009 For everyone who has moved to central Texas from more-hospitable gardening climates, who has tried (as I did) to plant azaleas, hostas, or dogwoods because that’s what reminds them of home, and who thinks, “Hey, look! This Austin nursery sells this plant, so it must grow well ...
Read This: Designer Plant Combinations
January 19, 2009 Soon enough daffodils, bluebonnets, and columbines will brighten our awakening gardens. Awakened ourselves to the joy of spring, we’ll throng to the nursery and snap up bedding plants and newly introduced perennials willy-nilly, bringing them home and plopping them in wherever we can find an open spot ...
Book review: Plant-Driven Design
November 29, 2008 In a garden-design class I attended not long after moving to Austin, the speaker showed slide after slide of lush English gardens to illustrate design principles. I understood the value of studying these magnificent gardens, but I questioned whether the style could be truly reinterpreted here in ...
Dirty hands & a passion for gardening
July 28, 2008 My hands (and feet) are often dirty, and I definitely have a “passion for gardening,” the subtitle of this month’s Garden Bloggers Book Club selection. So I got my grubby mitts on a copy of fellow Austinite Robin Chotzinoff‘s 1996 book People with Dirty Hands and read ...
Summer reading for gardeners
June 22, 2008With Austin on track for our hottest summer on record, I’ve sworn off any real gardening for the pleasures of garden book reading—inside, preferably under a ceiling fan with a cold Diet Dr. Pepper in my hand. Recent trips to Barnes & Noble and Half Price Books have ...
Painted wall inspiration
May 31, 2008 Imagine how thrilling this pale-yellow Opuntia flower would look against a lavender wall. Or maybe a leaf-green wall, which would contrast with the purple pads of the cactus, especially in winter when its color is strongest. I’ve just read the Summer 2008 issue of Wildflower, the magazine ...
Door prizes at Spring Fling
February 29, 2008 As if the Garden Bloggers Spring Fling on April 5 could get any more fun, we’re giving away garden-related door prizes at the County Line BBQ dinner (click here for info on reserving your seat). Several local businesses are generously donating gift items to our door-prize drawing, ...
Read This: Sunset’s Outdoor Living Series
January 31, 2008 My garden bookshelf suffers from a high-school clique problem. It’s the teenage cold war: cheerleaders and jocks versus honor students and geeks. In this case, inspirational eye-candy books with no practical smarts grudgingly share space with intelligent how-to guides dressed down with useful but non-glamorous illustrations. Although ...
Wildflower Center & Jill Nokes book-signing
December 01, 2007 The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center is a must-see destination in all seasons, but an autumn or winter visit is always delightful—and less crowded. Today was especially fun because Jill Nokes held a book-signing in the gift shop. Here she is holding a copy of her new ...
