Southeast

July 09, 2017 I didn’t expect to see a banana tree and sago palm in any of the gardens we visited during the Capital Region Garden Bloggers Fling last month, but Arlington, Virginia, designer Jeff Minnich‘s garden is full of surprises. Reminiscent of a New Orleans cottage garden with picket ...

July 05, 2017 Near Tyson’s Corner, Virginia, during the recent D.C.-area Garden Bloggers Fling, we toured the garden of Peg Bier, who’s been designing and experimenting with plants here for 40 years. Peg’s charming yellow house comes into view at the end of a well-screened driveway. Plenty of sun gives ...

July 03, 2017 Much as I love my contemporary-naturalistic garden, and enjoyed puttering in my flowery cottage garden before that, my next garden — whenever and wherever that turns out to be — is going to be more like this one: smaller, with formal garden rooms laid out along axis ...

July 02, 2017 Casa Mariposa With a garden called Casa Mariposa, you know it’s going to be welcoming to butterflies — and, as it turns out, all pollinators. Tammy Schmitt, head planner of this year’s Garden Bloggers Fling, bravely included her suburban D.C.-area garden on the tour. I say bravely ...

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 ...

June 29, 2017 Attending Garden Bloggers Fling is always a whirlwind of garden touring and socializing with other bloggers. I come home with ideas bouncing around in my head, as well as a sense of new connections made and friendships renewed — not to mention hundreds of photos to sort ...

April 06, 2016 Two weeks ago, in mid-March, the family and I drove to Orlando for spring break. Before heading home, we stopped in Vero Beach, Florida, for a day at the shore and to visit McKee Botanical Garden. Yes, those are dinosaurs in the garden. Roar of the Dinosaur, ...

March 21, 2016 Diagon Alley shops and the escaping Gringotts dragon, which belches fire periodically with a coughing roar and a furnace-blast of heat you can feel in the street below Last week for spring break, we packed up the car, dropped off the dog at Grandma’s, and set off ...

August 01, 2015 Our last stop on our cultural tour of the South (a family road trip in mid-July that began in Austin and included New Orleans, Atlanta, and Charlotte, North Carolina) was Memphis, Tennessee — Home of the Blues and the Birthplace of Rock-and-Roll. We spent two nights at ...

July 31, 2015 Earth Goddess, Atlanta Botanical Garden After we left New Orleans, we drove to Atlanta, Georgia, arriving in time for a Sunday evening visit to Atlanta Botanical Garden to see a special art exhibit, Bruce Munro: Light in the Garden. Seeing a garden in late afternoon and at ...

July 29, 2015 If you want to feel that you’ve traveled to a foreign city without leaving the country, visit New Orleans and stay in the historic French Quarter. We made the 8-hour drive from Austin a couple of weeks ago — our first stop on a family road trip ...

March 02, 2015 Last year I featured this Houston Heights garden in a Drive-By Gardens post. But last Saturday, while in Houston to visit family, I had the pleasure of meeting the owner, David Morello, who kindly gave me a full tour. David owns the design and build company David ...

April 10, 2014 The last stop on my recap of the Garden Conservancy-sponsored Houston Open Days tour on March 29th is a New Orleans-esque mansion in the tony River Oaks neighborhood. From the front walk you see a veranda with wisteria dripping from the wrought-iron railing and a narrow foundation ...

April 09, 2014 Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! On March 29, my friend Diana and I traveled to Houston for the Garden Conservancy-sponsored Open Days tour. Del Monte Drive in the posh River Oaks neighborhood was home to two of the gardens, starting with a surprising “safari garden” ...

April 07, 2014 The West Lane Garden, one of six private gardens on tour during the Garden Conservancy-sponsored Houston Open Days on March 29, is a showcase of contemporary design, which nicely complements the low-slung, renovated, mid-century modern house it frames. Organized around straight-line axes, with garden views that carry ...

April 07, 2014 Houston has one of the earliest Garden Conservancy-sponsored Open Days tours in the country. This year it was held on March 29, after a cold, drawn-out winter (by Texas standards) that saw two 20-degree dips even in subtropical Houston. I wondered how Houston would pull off a ...