Native plants and Hill Country style at Paula Stone’s Fredericksburg garden
October 25, 2022 Two Fridays ago a couple of friends and I drove out to Fredericksburg, a charming town in the Texas Hill Country, founded in the mid-1800s by German immigrants and built out of native limestone block, pressed-tin ceilings, and galvanized roofs. We’d been invited to visit by Paula ...
Hotel Magdalena courtyard evokes Hill Country canyon
October 06, 2022 After an all-day meeting on South Congress recently, I strolled down Music Lane to Hotel Magdalena, a boutique hotel that opened in 2020. I’d been wanting to see the place since learning that Ten Eyck Landscape Architects did the landscaping and Lake|Flato Architects designed the hotel itself ...
Ojos y Manos at Santa Fe Botanical Garden
September 21, 2022 The Ojos y Manos: Eyes and Hands Garden hadn’t opened the first time I visited Santa Fe Botanical Garden. So during my return visit last month, I was happy to be able to explore it. (Here’s Part 1 of my recent visit.) Ojos y Manos, an educational ...
Beautiful flora and fauna at Santa Fe Botanical Garden
September 19, 2022 During our stay in Santa Fe at the end of August, I spent one morning at Santa Fe Botanical Garden. I first visited in 2016, three years after it opened and right before the opening of Phase 2, Ojos y Manos: Eyes and Hands. My 6-year absence ...
Doors, gardens, art along Santa Fe’s Canyon Road
September 14, 2022 Santa Fe’s adobe structures seem an extension of the earth itself. Curvy walls in warm, desert hues — tan, soft rose, terracotta — rear up from the gravelly soil to enclose courtyards and residences. Wooden doors, some with slatted windows for a glimpse inside, add mystery and ...
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 ...
The yellow glow of late fall
December 02, 2021 Cool, blue-sky weather has me spending more time in the garden, having friends over, and tinkering with planting beds. It’s kind of glowing out there. Why? Yellow is the color of fall in my garden, starting with the wonderful forsythia sage (Salvia madrensis), which lights up the ...
Early fall purples in Sheryl’s garden
October 06, 2021 One hot September afternoon I visited blogger Sheryl Williams‘s garden in north Austin and spotted some gorgeous late-season purples in her not-quite-autumn garden. We were both smitten by spiky-skirted eryngo (Eryngium leavenworthii), a native Texas annual that resembles a thistle and is just as spiny. The rich ...
An icy garden on my 15th blogiversary
February 14, 2021 I started this blog 15 years ago today, a Valentine’s Day treat to myself as I joined the online gardening community. At first Digging was all about documenting and sharing photos of my Austin cottage garden, which I left behind 13 years ago when we moved to ...
Grow a hedge using native Texas plants
November 30, 2020 I want to share a little more Wildflower Center inspiration, this time from the maze in the Family Garden. Traditionally mazes are defined by clipped boxwood or yew hedges that grow at least to head-height — about 6 feet tall. Here at Austin’s native-plant botanical garden, the ...
Bigtooth maples and more fall foliage at the Wildflower Center, part 2
November 19, 2020 Did a few bigtooth maples from Lost Maples Park lose their way and end up at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center? It sure looked that way last week, when I spotted pumpkin-spice trees in the Family Garden. This is part 2 of my tour. Big, colorful ...
Colorful fall foliage at the Wildflower Center, part 1
November 17, 2020 Fall pounced on Austin quickly this year, then retreated for nearly a month, and then dashed back in, ushering in a brief flare of color. We’d planned to visit Lost Maples this month in hopes of seeing the bigtooth maples flaming red and orange, but we missed ...
Native Texas Park: Rediscovering a lost prairie at George W. Bush Presidential Library
October 23, 2020 Blackland prairie, a sash of Texas grassland across the center of the state, running southwest from the Oklahoma border to San Antonio, is the most endangered ecosystem in the U.S., with less than 1% remaining, according to Austin environmental designer John Hart Asher in a Wildflower article ...
