Flowers

November 04, 2012 On Saturday I joined several garden-blogging friends for the biennial Open Days tour, sponsored by the Garden Conservancy. I consider Open Days to be the best garden tour in Austin. You often see high-design gardens mingled with a gardener’s sensibility and creative, personal touches. This year’s Open ...

October 28, 2012Morning light gilds the cactus and succulent garden Keith and Helga Zwickl welcomed us to their Tucson, Arizona, garden during the Garden Writers Association symposium a couple of weeks ago. I really enjoyed this garden, not only for its stunning collection of cacti and succulents, but also for ...

October 26, 2012Arizona adobe When you have to jackhammer the “soil” to plant anything, when your garden gets only 12 inches of rainfall a year, when you live in a desert, you just know gardening isn’t going to be easy. And yet, despite these conditions in Tucson, Arizona, which I ...

June 21, 2011 Not everyone loves agaves as much as I do, I realize (shaking my head in astonishment). For you, then, these flowery images from the Juniper Level Botanic Garden at Plant Delights Nursery in Raleigh, N.C., which I visited two weeks ago. Pictured above is an orange dahlia, ...

March 30, 2011 A bit of the Old South blooms at Zilker Botanical Garden each spring. Under a green canopy of new-leafed trees, banks of pink and fuchsia azaleas remind one of Austin’s split personality, where alkaline-loving plants of the arid southwest mingle with acidic-loving plants of the lush southeast ...

September 15, 2010 Having just returned from a trip to Madison, Wisconsin, where my husband competed in his first Ironman triathlon, I want to treat you to pics from the delightful Dane County Farmers’ Market on the Capitol Square last Saturday. Overcast skies and a little rain could not dampen ...

July 31, 2010 Looking out my living room window toward the stock-tank pond, this caught my eye: dozens of sugar-sweet rain lilies (Zephryanthes ‘Labuffarosea’) blooming with abandon after our recent rains. Because they celebrate the rain, I feel a kinship with them. Summer rain is always welcome here. I also ...

July 13, 2010 Sweet-smelling, freckled lilies. Crimson bee balm as tall as myself. Soft-textured lawn grass spangled with white clover, so different from Austin’s coarse, shaggy St. Augustine and so much more inviting. Tall, brick Victorian homes standing shoulder-to-shoulder on streets shaded by goth-cloaked Norway maples. A city eager to ...

April 11, 2010 Does this cow know how beautiful its Hill Country pasture is this spring? Fields so blue your teeth ache. Tender, new leaves so green they’ll break your heart. A magic carpet of Texas wildflowers. This was our quest yesterday as we drove the famed Willow City Loop ...

March 22, 2010 Over spring break we drove 3,200 miles (5,149 km) round-trip to Florida, with stops in Orlando, Miami, Everglades National Park, the Keys (all the way to Key West), and finally Naples to see the brand-new botanical garden there. Planted last August and opened to the public in ...

June 02, 2009 Tulips and toadflax Where to begin? Yesterday afternoon I returned to Austin from the second annual Garden Bloggers Spring Fling, held in Chicago this year, feeling dazzled by all the spring-blooming Windy City gardens, hoarse from talking so much with friends old and new, and dog-tired from ...

May 15, 2009 I nearly didn’t post this Bloom Day, having a lot of work on my desk that needs doing, plus a stock tank pond that needs installing. But when I went out this morning to water some new plants and recent transplants, I noticed some new May flowers ...

May 02, 2009 I inherited five large pineapple guavas (Feijoa sellowiana ) with the new house, which line the live oak-shaded back fence, alternating with pyracantha. Neither pineapple guava nor pyracantha is said to prefer shade, but these seem to be doing okay anyway. I love the dusty bluish-green foliage ...

May 02, 2009 I inherited five large pineapple guavas (Feijoa sellowiana ) with the new house, which line the live oak-shaded back fence, alternating with pyracantha. Neither pineapple guava nor pyracantha is said to prefer shade, but these seem to be doing okay anyway. I love the dusty bluish-green foliage ...

April 28, 2009 After visiting Jill Nokes’s walled garden last Sunday, the Austin garden bloggers drove to fellow blogger Jenny/Lancashire Rose‘s walled garden. Although differentiated by geography—Jill gardens on black gumbo clay in central Austin, Jenny on thin limestone “soil” and gravel in southwest Austin—they have much in common, including ...

April 28, 2009 After visiting Jill Nokes’s walled garden last Sunday, the Austin garden bloggers drove to fellow blogger Jenny/Lancashire Rose‘s walled garden. Although differentiated by geography—Jill gardens on black gumbo clay in central Austin, Jenny on thin limestone “soil” and gravel in southwest Austin—they have much in common, including ...