Easy outdoor living in garden of designer B. Jane: Austin Open Days Tour 2017

Easy outdoor living in garden of designer B. Jane: Austin Open Days Tour 2017

November 15, 2017 For a refreshing contemporary design with fun colors and a restrained palette of tough-as-nails native plants, designer B. Jane‘s garden is the place to hang out. Her personal garden in Austin’s Brentwood neighborhood was featured on the Garden Conservancy-sponsored Open Days tour a couple of weeks ago ...
Garden rooms and green roof at Cloverleaf Drive Garden: Austin Open Days Tour 2017

Garden rooms and green roof at Cloverleaf Drive Garden: Austin Open Days Tour 2017

November 13, 2017 This year’s Garden Conservancy-sponsored Open Days tour in Austin featured gardens in a variety of styles and a variety of neighborhoods (not just West Austin). I especially enjoyed exploring the Cloverleaf Drive garden, which, along with Jackson Broussard’s, is located east of I-35 in a “regular-folks” neighborhood ...
Garden of Jackson Broussard: Austin Open Days Tour 2017

Garden of Jackson Broussard: Austin Open Days Tour 2017

November 10, 2017 For landscape architect Jackson Broussard, you really can go home again. He was raised in this modest ranch house in east-central Austin, and after he took ownership he freshened up the house and leased it out and built himself a detached, two-story addition in the back yard ...
Sunset at magical Cannon Beach, Oregon

Sunset at magical Cannon Beach, Oregon

September 27, 2017 I’m not a beach person. I don’t enjoy lying in the sun, sweating on the sand, nor do I like to swim in the ocean. You don’t do any of that at Cannon Beach, in Oregon, which is one of the reasons I enjoy it so much ...
Blue fantasy in the garden of Linda Hostetler: Capital Region Garden Bloggers Fling

Blue fantasy in the garden of Linda Hostetler: Capital Region Garden Bloggers Fling

July 02, 2017 I saw some truly wonderful gardens during the Capital Region Garden Bloggers Fling last week, and one of my favorites was that of landscape designer Linda Hostetler in The Plains, Virginia. From the street you admire a handsome farmhouse-style home at the end of a wide, curving ...
Bald cypress creek, beer patios, & other comforts in Comfort, Texas

Bald cypress creek, beer patios, & other comforts in Comfort, Texas

May 31, 2017 For our 27th wedding anniversary last weekend, my husband and I enjoyed a weekend away in Comfort, Texas, a tiny Hill Country town two hours southwest of Austin. After reading about the stylishly rustic charms of Camp Comfort in seemingly every regional magazine (Tribeza, Southern Living, Texas ...
Life is beautiful at Moroccan-inspired Tanglewild Gardens

Life is beautiful at Moroccan-inspired Tanglewild Gardens

May 25, 2017 As we roll toward summer here in Austin, this gardener begins to fantasize about decamping for cooler climes, like the Pacific Northwest, a gardener’s paradise. So it was surprising and enlightening to hear Skottie O’Mahony and Jeff Breitenstein, longtime Seattle residents who are now cultivating an exotic, ...
Modern, easy-care garden of Austin designer B. Jane

Modern, easy-care garden of Austin designer B. Jane

May 22, 2017 I’ve long admired designer B. Jane‘s contemporary-style gardens here in Austin, including one I wrote about for Austin Home last year. Last week I visited B.’s personal garden in Central Austin’s Brentwood neighborhood and fell hard for her lawn-free, block-planted front yard. A straight walk of Lueders ...
Agave and cactus splendor in the garden of Matt Shreves

Agave and cactus splendor in the garden of Matt Shreves

May 16, 2017 For Foliage Follow-Up this month, I’m taking you on a tour of Matt Shreves’s garden near Lake Travis. A succulent and cactus lover (check out his spikealicious Instagram page), Matt has turned an ordinary yard into a tapestry of foliage texture, color, and bold form. Let’s start ...
Easy livin' at Lake Livingston

Easy livin’ at Lake Livingston

November 21, 2016 Lake lounging. Wine sipping. Sunrise and sunset watching. That’s what we did over the weekend at the getaway cottage my sister and sister-in-law own on Lake Livingston in the pineywoods of East Texas. Here’s a sunrise view from their back porch. Around 12 hours later, here’s the ...
RH Austin rooftop garden showcases contemporary outdoor furniture

RH Austin rooftop garden showcases contemporary outdoor furniture

October 06, 2016 Three weeks after its grand opening, I climbed the glittering, mirrored grand staircase at the 62,000-square-foot mansion known as RH Austin (Restoration Hardware, rebranded), one of the anchor stores in the new Northside section of The Domain shopping center in north Austin. After a cursory inspection of ...
I went to the woods and saw Walden Road Garden: Minneapolis Garden Bloggers Fling

I went to the woods and saw Walden Road Garden: Minneapolis Garden Bloggers Fling

July 28, 2016 When you live on Walden Road and you’re creating a garden, you can do a lot worse than take inspiration from Thoreau. This woodsy, serene garden was on the Master Gardeners tour that we saw on day two of the Minneapolis Garden Bloggers Fling, held earlier this ...
Garden marries home at destination nursery/garden shop Terrain

Garden marries home at destination nursery/garden shop Terrain

June 20, 2016 Anthropologie meets Flora Grubb Gardens? Yes, please! While in the Brandywine Valley outside of Philadelphia earlier this month, I was eager to visit Terrain, a nursery, home and garden shop, and restaurant located in Glen Mills, Pennsylvania. (There’s a second location in Westport, Connecticut.) Founded by the ...
Spring visit to Hill Country Water Gardens & Nursery

Spring visit to Hill Country Water Gardens & Nursery

March 11, 2016A few days ago I visited my favorite North Austin nursery, Hill Country Water Gardens & Nursery, which is actually located in Cedar Park, just northwest of Austin. As the name implies, HCWG carries pond plants, fish, fountains, pond equipment, and other water-garden supplies. But over the past ...
Colorful LA garden of Potted maven Annette Gutierrez

Colorful LA garden of Potted maven Annette Gutierrez

September 25, 2015 I was in Los Angeles/Pasadena last weekend for the annual Garden Writers Association symposium, and boy oh boy, do I have some cool gardens to show you! Not all were on the GWA tours, which were limited to 3 private gardens and one public garden (the fabulous ...
Lively formality in the garden of Deborah Hornickel

Lively formality in the garden of Deborah Hornickel

July 06, 2015 If you admired the beautiful details of James David’s grand Rollingwood garden, which I had the privilege of visiting last spring, you may have wondered what a smaller, more economically built garden of his might look like. And I’m here to show you, thanks to James’s longtime ...