Garden path wonderland at Paxson Hill Farm, part 3
February 15, 2022 My detour to Paxson Hill Farm‘s beautiful and imaginative gardens in New Hope, Pennsylvania, proved to be a highlight of my big road trip last October. Here’s Part 3 of my tour. Click here for Part 1 and Part 2. Railroad tie path Leaving the hobbit house ...
Fantasy gardens at Paxson Hill Farm, part 2
February 11, 2022 The gardens of Paxson HIll Farm, which I explored during the Pennsylvania portion of my road trip last October, started out good and got even better. In my last post I shared the farm’s nursery, Shade Garden, Katsura Garden, and Temple Garden. Let’s move on to a ...
Grand trees and pastoral views at Winterthur, part 1
February 02, 2022 Japanese maple I first visited Winterthur on a blustery June day in 2016. In mid-October last year, I returned to see the garden at the turn of a new season, its summer greens tinged with pale gold and rusty orange, berries and quince brightening bare branches, and ...
James Golden’s Federal Twist garden is like Fight Club, except we do talk about it
January 22, 2022 At the garden gate, towering grasses make you feel about 3 feet tall Plants duke it out for space and sunlight in every garden. But at Federal Twist, a wet-meadow garden in a clearing in the woods near Stockton, New Jersey, you witness the brawling fistfight from ...
LongHouse Reserve ramble, Part 2: Woodland garden, Yoko Ono sculpture, and Red Garden
January 06, 2022 When textile-artist Jack Lenor Larsen created his garden at LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton, New York, one of his goals, according to online interviews, was to encourage people to be nonconformist. He wanted to show that more can be done with a suburban backyard than the typical ...
Mad about Madoo, part 2: Formal garden and iconic Chinese bridge
December 23, 2021 Continuing with my visit to Madoo, an artist’s garden in Sagaponack, New York, let’s head to the rear of the 2-acre property. A long rectangular section extends out from the main gardens, reaching toward agricultural fields beyond the fence line. An ornate blue gate opens to an ...
Mad about Madoo: The secret garden, potager, and ginkgo grove
December 22, 2021 I’d driven out to the Hamptons — a Long Island, NY, detour on my October road trip from Maine to Virginia — mainly to see one garden: Madoo. The name itself is an endearment, taken from a Scottish dialect in which ma doo means my dove or ...
Autumn asters, garden rooms in Michael Gordon’s New Hampshire garden
November 29, 2021 Michael Gordon’s garden in early October is aster-licious Through phone interviews for magazine assignments, I’ve gotten to “know” many interesting gardeners around the country. One of these is Michael Gordon of Peterborough, New Hampshire, whose garden I wrote about for Country Gardens in 2019. An optometrist by ...
Meeting up with “Gays Who Garden” Andrew and Jared
November 15, 2021 I can’t remember when I started following @gayswhogarden on Instagram, but their alliterative, cheeky, and decidedly out username caught my eye, as did their beautiful images of soft-petaled roses, colorful Texas wildflowers, and glowing dahlias (in Austin — how??). We started chatting online, and in due course ...
Tour of P. Allen Smith’s Moss Mountain Farm: Terrace Garden and Sister Oak
July 07, 2021 After St. Louis, Mom and I headed back to Texas via Little Rock, Arkansas. On the morning of June 17th, we wound our way into the hills northwest of the city and joined 80 others with a reservation for lunch and a tour of Moss Mountain Farm, ...
Home gardening inspiration, plus a boxwood garden and Chinese garden: Missouri Botanical Garden, part 4
June 27, 2021 Visiting Missouri Botanical Garden (MOBOT) earlier this month for the first time, I expected to breeze through the Center for Home Gardening and get on to more interesting parts of the garden. Instead I found myself poking around this space for close to an hour. I was ...
Climatron tropical house, origami sculpture, and more: Missouri Botanical Garden, part 1
June 22, 2021 A week ago today I road-tripped with my mom through Arkansas up to St. Louis to visit Missouri Botanical Garden, which I’d long wanted to see. I’d always thought of St. Louis as being not that far away from Austin. After all, Missouri is part of the ...
Bee balm, daylilies, and fawn season
June 13, 2021 I’m grateful for the past two weeks of off-and-on rain, which helped my garden rebound from the epic February freeze. Early June may be hot and muggy now, but the garden is full and flowery. And the driveway border is back, baby! ‘Peter’s Purple’ bee balm (Monarda ...
Spring sights in the garden
April 29, 2021 ‘Frazzle Dazzle’ dyckia My spring planting is done, and I think all my post-freeze cutting back is done too. There are still brown shrubs and dead-looking small trees (like a pomegranate coming back from the roots, with a few leaves here and there on upper branches) taking ...
Pittosporums and palms zapped by February freeze at Zilker Botanical Garden
April 26, 2021 The damage and plant kills at Zilker Botanical Garden stunned me when I visited a week and a half ago. No garden in Austin was spared during February’s Big Freeze, and of course our public gardens weren’t either. But I still wasn’t prepared to see the ancient, ...
My shrubs and woody perennials: Alive, dead or in-between? Evaluating plants 2 months after Texas freeze
April 14, 2021 ‘Winter Gem’ boxwoods shrugged off the freeze with no damage, as did ‘Micron’ yaupon hollies (center circle) Texas gardeners are feverishly comparing notes about plant survivors and croakers after February’s Big Freeze. I’m doing the same and documenting how every plant in my garden fared. Please see ...
