Design

April 14, 2009 “Get your desert eyes on,” Scott Calhoun urges in his new book The Hot Garden. In other words, see and appreciate the natural beauty of a country that is not lush, leafy, or green and that relies on rock and open space as much as plants for ...

April 06, 2009 As springtime sends you racing out into your yard, eager to create the garden you’ve been dreaming of all winter, publishers are releasing new design books seemingly daily to inspire, to educate, and to demystify the process. One of these is Julie Moir Messervy’s Home Outside: Creating ...

April 01, 2009 If you’ve been following the design of my new circle garden, you might be wondering how it looks now that the initial planting and mulching have been done. Here’s a nearly 360-degree look at the space. Pictured above is the view as you come into the back ...

March 23, 2009 For Spring Break I did a week of hard labor, digging out grass and live-oak suckers, shaking dirt out of the turf in order to reduce my yard waste and conserve good soil, moving small boulders, and wheel-barrowing 5 cubic yards of soil (still moving the last ...

March 18, 2009 Lest I give you the wrong impression that all I do in the garden is flit around taking pretty pictures of salvias and the ‘Whale’s Tongue’ agave, let me show you the down and dirty on what I’ve been doing this week and last. It isn’t pretty, ...

February 09, 2009 As big as a red-eyed bull and twice as ugly, the City of Austin’s gray garbage bins and huge, blue recycling bins are creating angst among homeowners who don’t know where to park these monsters. If you put them in the garage, your car won’t fit. Stashed ...

February 04, 2009 Regular readers know that I’ve moped about the trampoline that hulks in my garden. In my old garden, I disguised it with a trellis screen. In the new garden, we’ve installed it on the lowest level of the lot, where it’s partially screened by a clump of ...

January 26, 2009 Little by little a new garden is taking shape. This pot of ‘Blue Elf’ aloe in bud holds the promise of beauty in days to come. Starting a new garden on an older home lot offers the chance to correct the uglies that former owners never got ...

January 19, 2009 Soon enough daffodils, bluebonnets, and columbines will brighten our awakening gardens. Awakened ourselves to the joy of spring, we’ll throng to the nursery and snap up bedding plants and newly introduced perennials willy-nilly, bringing them home and plopping them in wherever we can find an open spot ...

January 06, 2009 If you need some great garden reading and images to get you through winter, go visit the Wisconsin blog Each Little World and click on the category My Garden Odyssey in the left sidebar. Linda writes and her husband, Mark, takes the photos for Each Little World, ...

January 03, 2009 My first post of the new year shows me still raiding the garden of the Unsold House, this time for a statuesque softleaf yucca (Y. recurvifolia ), visible at back, to anchor a newly dug patch of dirt below the raised beds. How could I leave this ...

December 12, 2008 Lately an unassuming container made for ranch life has been appearing in creative and stylish urban gardens: the stock tank, or cattle trough. It’s Old Texas meets New Texas, and boy howdy, it works. Warehoused among poultry feed, hog fencing, and deer corn at farm-supply stores like ...

November 29, 2008 In a garden-design class I attended not long after moving to Austin, the speaker showed slide after slide of lush English gardens to illustrate design principles. I understood the value of studying these magnificent gardens, but I questioned whether the style could be truly reinterpreted here in ...

September 21, 2008 Last week I posted about punctuating a fine-textured garden with bold-leaf or boldly shaped plants. Here’s another one that I use to set off the fine leaves of Salvia greggii , Cuphea ignea, Bulbine frutescens , and ‘Powis Castle’ artemesia: Yucca recurvifolia , or softleaf yucca. I ...

September 18, 2008 If, like me, you are trying to grow water-thrifty plants in central Texas, you soon find that most of them have teeny-tiny leaves—think salvias, Mexican oregano, cupheas, native daisies, penstemons, etc. Teeny-tiny leaves, along with waxy and hairy leaves, are the xeric plant’s defense against water loss ...

August 04, 2008 It was 105 degrees F (40.5 C) in central Austin yesterday, and we’re expecting the same today. After more than a month of triple-digit temperatures and no rain, I can tell you that things are looking brown and parched around town. And from the news and garden ...