Austin Open Days Tour 2012: Garden of Yvonne Tocquigny
November 05, 2012 My second stop on Saturday’s Garden Conservancy’s Open Days tour was the courtyard garden of Yvonne Tocquigny and Tom Fornoff, located in West Austin’s tony Tarrytown neighborhood. Elegant but relaxed and beautifully designed, this garden has a secret-garden aspect, with green walls erected in front and in ...
An evening visit to Scott Calhoun’s Zona Gardens studio
October 31, 2012 I don’t remember how I acquired Yard Full of Sun, Scott Calhoun’s 2005 memoir about making a garden that honors its desert setting. As soon as I read the first pages, his story, told with humor, crisp writing, and enticing photos, hooked me. Since then I’ve read ...
Garden writers convene in the desert for Tucson GWA Symposium
October 21, 2012 A few short years ago I didn’t think of myself as a garden writer. I was a garden blogger, plain and simple. But then I started getting offered, and learned to pursue, paid writing assignments, and now I have a book coming out, a fact that still ...
Inside Austin Gardens Tour 2012: Ann and Robin Matthews Garden
October 11, 2012 I’m continuing my sneak preview of the upcoming Inside Austin Gardens Tour, hosted by the Travis County Master Gardeners. In my last post I showed you Donnis Doyle’s colorful, whimsical garden. This garden belongs to her next-door neighbors, Ann and Robin Matthews, and they’ve been friends and ...
Inside Austin Gardens Tour 2012: Donnis Doyle Garden
October 10, 2012 The Austin garden bloggers recently got a sneak preview of the upcoming Inside Austin Gardens Tour, hosted by the Travis County Master Gardeners. We visited 5 gardens, and I hope to be able to show them all to you before the tour date on October 20th. I’ll ...
Front yard garden in full fall bloom
October 02, 2012 Every time I arrive at home, slowing to pull into my driveway, I get to enjoy this. Yep, this is my neighbor Donna’s streetside garden that she let me design for her earlier this year. And now it’s all filled in and blooming like crazy. Here’s how ...
Rocking a no-lawn gravel garden
September 19, 2012 Every time I pull into my driveway I feel happy looking at the new gravel garden that’s replaced the old foundation-hugging bed and lawn. BEFORE: A fairly traditional foundation strip and lawn edged with dwarf mondo grass. The shrubs were planted too close to the foundation, but ...
Drive-By Gardens: Sedge lawn and grasses make another lawn-gone garden
September 11, 2012 Driving in East Austin recently, I spotted this cheery yellow house with an alternative lawn of sedge—probably either Texas or Berkeley sedge—in the front yard… …and a row of native Lindheimer muhly (Muhlenbergia lindheimeri) along the side-yard fence. A few brown patches marred the beauty of the ...
Stylish xeric garden by Sitio Design
September 04, 2012 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 ...
August garden planning & fall anticipation
August 19, 2012 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 ...
Dad’s North Carolina garden for Bloom Day
August 15, 2012 Last week I took a quick trip to central North Carolina to visit my dad, who lives in the charming Fearrington Village planned community. (Pics of the Fearrington House Inn garden coming soon.) Many of his neighbors—and this is a neighborhood of retirees—have opted out of extensive ...
Plant recommendations in Lawn Gone! Meet the experts
August 14, 2012 There’s not one perfect lawn alternative for the whole country, right? After all, good plant choices are highly dependent on local conditions: high and low temps, soil, rainfall, etc. So for the Regional Plant Recommendations section in Lawn Gone!, my upcoming book, I invited 11 gardening experts ...
Drive-By Gardens: Rockin’ alternative lawns in north Austin
July 30, 2012 Driving around north Austin last week, I spotted quite a few nontraditional front yards, where the owners had traded in the typical expanse of St. Augustine or Bermuda for a smaller plot of grass, a sedge lawn, or a garden instead of lawn. No matter the style, ...
Lawn Gone! book available for pre-order
July 22, 2012 After a fall and winter of writing and compiling photos and a spring and summer of editing and proofreading, I’m thrilled to announce that my upcoming book, Lawn Gone! Low-Maintenance, Sustainable, Attractive Alternatives for Your Yard, has a beautiful cover design and is now available for pre-order ...
Plano Prairie Garden alight with fall color
October 21, 2011 Sometimes you just luck into a great garden visit. Last weekend my family and I drove up to Dallas for the state fair, staying overnight at my father-in-law’s house in Richardson, a northern suburb. The day we left Austin I realized that we would be staying very ...
Read This: The American Meadow Garden
January 22, 2011 In this age of lawn bashing, let me say this: I am not anti-lawn. Lawn is useful for picnicking, playing sports, throwing a ball for the dog, sunbathing, and providing a restful bit of green amid a garden. A lawn of needed size, maintained without dumping chemicals ...
