Southwest

September 14, 2009 On Sunday afternoon, with temps in the low 80s and rain-heavy clouds in the sky, the kids and I dropped by the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center for an hour-long stroll. During our hot summers I tend to avoid outings that don’t involve a steady supply of ...

September 02, 2009 Cascading down a steep-sloping front yard, Jeff Pavlat’s 8-year-old terraced xeric garden is a symphony of form, texture, and subtle color echoes. I met Jeff a year ago at an Oracle Gorge Nursery sale and have asked his advice about agaves and aloes from time to time ...

September 02, 2009 Cascading down a steep-sloping front yard, Jeff Pavlat’s 8-year-old terraced xeric garden is a symphony of form, texture, and subtle color echoes. I met Jeff a year ago at an Oracle Gorge Nursery sale and have asked his advice about agaves and aloes from time to time ...

May 19, 2009 In mid-April we took out-of-town visitors to Umlauf Sculpture Garden, located near Barton Springs and Zilker Park on the site of Charles Umlauf (1911-1994) and his wife’s former home and studio. More than 130 of Umlauf’s sculptures, drawings, and paintings are on display here, including Lovers V ...

May 11, 2009 Our fourth and final stop on the Wildflower Center-sponsored Gardens on Tour was the Kempson Drive garden. Tucked in the suburban back yard of a hilly, new-ish development of same-looking, two-story homes in southwest Austin, this garden offered a dual surprise. One side of the garden featured ...

May 11, 2009 A carpet of silver ponyfoot (Dichondra argentea) sparkles like a stream in the Buckeye Trail garden. My pictures from this garden, our third stop on the Wildflower Center-sponsored Gardens on Tour, don’t do it justice. The Buckeye Trail garden, located in Rollingwood, was my favorite of the ...

May 10, 2009 Our second stop on the Wildflower Center-sponsored Gardens on Tour was the Rockcliff Road garden in upscale, woodsy Westlake. This garden surprised me by virtue of its loose, naturalistic style juxtaposed with a large, expensive home; I expected a more formal, even contemporary, garden out front, but ...

May 10, 2009 On Saturday I joined Diana of Sharing Nature’s Garden, Lori of The Gardener of Good and Evil, and a friend of Lori’s from Arizona to visit four private gardens on the Wildflower Center-sponsored Gardens on Tour, an annual tour of gardens that predominantly feature native Texas plants ...

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 ...

April 27, 2009 The Austin garden bloggers met up on Sunday in the walled gardens of two talented local gardeners: designer and author Jill Nokes and our own Jenny Stocker, whom you may know as Lancashire Rose on her blog, Rock Rose. I didn’t take an official count, but I ...

April 27, 2009 The Austin garden bloggers met up on Sunday in the walled gardens of two talented local gardeners: designer and author Jill Nokes and our own Jenny Stocker, whom you may know as Lancashire Rose on her blog, Rock Rose. I didn’t take an official count, but I ...

November 08, 2008 Funny name and all, Peckerwood Garden is a place I’d wanted to see for years. But because it opens to the public for only a handful of days each year and it bars children under 12 from visiting (for safety reasons), as well as the fact that ...

October 10, 2008 After visiting the theatrical Stone Palms garden during the Garden Conservancy’s Open Days Austin tour last Saturday, Annie in Austin and I headed over to east Austin to visit the Tex-Asian garden dubbed Fatal Flower. As you can see, that’s a bit of a misnomer since there ...

October 07, 2008 I’m back! After a whirlwind weekend of packing, lifting, and unpacking, we’re settling into our new house. I will post pictures of the new yard soon, but all my attention so far has been focused on the inside of the house. Boxes still loom in the hallways ...

August 12, 2008 Soon after crossing the Red River from Texas into Oklahoma, you notice a preponderance of Native American imagery on signs, license plates, and billboards. Turnpikes are named for tribes, and official signs along the highways announce when you’ve entered an Indian nation—for instance, the Creek Nation or ...