Cowboy pool, colorful outdoor living: Lorie and Michael Kinler’s Fort Worth Garden
March 05, 2021 Last fall, during a weekend trip to Dallas, I was invited to visit the Fort Worth garden of Lorie and Michael Kinler. The Kinlers are the design duo behind Redenta’s Landscape Design Kinler Landscape Architecture (renamed in 2022), formerly affiliated with Redenta’s Garden nursery in Dallas. A ...
Glowing front-yard gardens, plus Fearless Gardening winner
January 16, 2021 On twilight walks around the neighborhood I love coming to this house, the home of neighbor friends who deck out their front-yard garden with hanging globes of blue and white for Christmas every year. I’m in no hurry for them to take them down. The lights add ...
Origami sculpture in the Culinary and Adventure gardens at San Antonio Botanical Garden
December 10, 2020 Part 3 of my recent visit to San Antonio Botanical Garden to see the Origami in the Garden exhibition by Santa Fe artist Kevin Box takes us through the relatively new Culinary and Family Adventure gardens. Two festive Christmas trees greeted me just inside the entrance. Zachry ...
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 ...
Home-garden design inspiration using native plants
November 29, 2020 On my recent visit to the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, I was struck by the design of this small garden, which uses native Texas plants in a traditional but lively way to create a space that would look right at home in a residential setting. It’s ...
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 ...
Fall garden scenes
November 06, 2020 Fall color is subtle in Austin, but I’ve been enjoying the flowering of autumn perennials like our native fall aster (Aster oblongifolius). Purple sunbursts! This aster grows like a groundcover and benefits from an early summer trim, by about half, to keep it from flopping by fall ...
Water, water everywhere in Cat’s wildlife-friendly garden
September 22, 2020 Every time I visit my friend Cat Jones‘s garden, it’s lovelier than the time before. Over the past 4 to 5 years she’s been busily making her Steiner Ranch garden, which overlooks a wildflower meadow and a wooded canyon, into a retreat for her and her family ...
Oxblood and rain lilies bloom after late-summer rains
September 08, 2020 Oxblood lilies add a dash of hot color in the raised bed behind the house. It’s oxblood lily time, baby! That excitement you hear is my delight over the early and unexpected end to break from Texas’s interminable summer. Late last week, two inches of rain and ...
Cenizo in bloom after the rain
September 06, 2020 Praise be to the rain gods, who delivered 2 inches of rain Thursday and Friday and broke Austin’s month-long heat wave. Rain lilies and oxblood lilies are waving their flower flags in celebration, but the prima donna of rain-celebrating plants has to be cenizo (Leucophyllum frutescens). This ...
Circle Garden’s shades of green
August 18, 2020 Our elevated deck offers a nice overhead view of the Circle Garden. And as I recently discovered, when you climb a stepladder on the deck, you can get almost the whole garden in the frame, including the new rose and salvia planting at the base of the ...
Revamping the Circle Garden, again
July 29, 2020 The summer doldrums, I call it. When it feels like a sauna outside, and it won’t rain, and yet the plants and especially the weeds grow like Jack’s magical beanstalk until the garden feels suffocated by vegetation. That’s where I was a couple weeks ago, with tree ...
Summertime plant whacking
June 04, 2020 Whacking — it’s what I do in summer as plants grow bushy or tall or lean where they shouldn’t. I had to whack back the Verbena bonariensis in the Circle Garden so that I could walk, not sidle, along the path. The ‘Winter Gem’ boxwoods also got ...
Oakleaf hydrangea blooming but wants acidic soil
May 24, 2020 After years of coveting oakleaf hydrangeas (Hydrangea quercifolia) I’d seen in other Austin gardens, I found a shady, relatively moist spot to plant one of my own. Near an air-conditioning unit’s condensate discharge, which directs water toward this bed, and shaded by a large crape myrtle, this ...
Verbena explosion
May 07, 2020 It turns out a 6-foot-tall stand of Verbena bonariensis is all you need to dispel traces of coronafunk. For years I’ve grown tall verbena in a halfhearted, one-plant-in-part-shade way. Not bad. But now — shazam! — a mass of it in the Circle Garden delights me whenever ...
