Maroon Bells hike through Colorado wildflowers
August 03, 2021 Texans flock to Colorado to escape summer’s heat, and we’ve made our share of road trips up through Boulder, Estes Park, Breckenridge, and Durango. But somehow we’d never been to Aspen. We remedied that oversight in mid-July, when the alpine meadows were quilted by colorful wildflowers. A ...
Victorian Garden, Stumpery, and origami sculpture: Missouri Botanical Garden, part 2
June 24, 2021 It’s Pollinator Week, so I’ll kick off Part 2 of my visit to Missouri Botanical Garden (MOBOT) with this bee-attracting patch of coneflowers behind one of the administrative buildings. What a pretty little garden of echinacea, allium, and amsonia in a hidden-away spot. Victorian Garden In contrast, ...
Modern ranch garden embraces water collection and wildflowers in New Braunfels
May 17, 2021 Last spring Cody and Michelle Koehler finished their garden installation at their home in New Braunfels, Texas. Less than a year later, February’s epic freeze killed most of their large specimen plants, including Weber agaves, olive and palo verde trees, and toothless sotol. Like everyone else in ...
Palms, agaves, and edibles in Peter Schaar Garden
October 27, 2020 I was happy to have the opportunity to see the garden of Peter Schaar in Dallas in early October. I know Peter as a palm and agave lover, a rose enthusiast (note the Texas Rose Rustler t-shirt), and an avid cook with a taste for growing herbs ...
Native Texas Park: Rediscovering a lost prairie at George W. Bush Presidential Library
October 23, 2020 Blackland prairie, a sash of Texas grassland across the center of the state, running southwest from the Oklahoma border to San Antonio, is the most endangered ecosystem in the U.S., with less than 1% remaining, according to Austin environmental designer John Hart Asher in a Wildflower article ...
The garden of Redenta’s Garden owner Ruth Kinler
October 12, 2020 It was the colorful, modern Fermob furniture that first lured me into Redenta’s Garden, a beloved Dallas nursery “for the modern gardener.” (Click for my tour.) So when I visited the home garden of owner Ruth Kinler, I was happily unsurprised to see more of that fabulous ...
Plant trials with style at Redenta’s Landscape Design office garden
October 07, 2020 With beautiful fall weather on tap and the first of the Mexico-bound monarch butterflies reaching North Texas, last weekend seemed like the perfect time for a trip to Dallas-Fort Worth. So I reached out to a few gardeners there and mapped out a 2-day itinerary, and my ...
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 ...
Wildflowers and birding at Montaña de Oro State Park
July 24, 2020 We detoured to San Luis Obispo after Yosemite National Park (click here for the how and why of our socially distanced road trip in June) in order to see our niece, who attends college there. To be safe, we met up outdoors at Spooner’s Cove in scenic ...
San Antonio Botanical Garden reopening, part 1
May 19, 2020 After a month and a half self-isolating at home, I was craving a garden visit when I got the news that both the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center and San Antonio Botanical Garden were opening back up at limited capacity. I immediately went online and secured tickets ...
Wild kingdom in the backyard
April 28, 2020 Texas spiny lizards tend to be skittish, scuttling under the car or a potted plant when you walk by. But one very laid-back lizard has taken up residence on the shady upper patio in recent weeks. It calmly eyes me and holds its ground, even when I’m ...
Read This: The Pollinator Victory Garden
April 22, 2020 Today is Earth Day, a reminder to do all we can to help Mother Nature and make a positive difference for the health of our planet. May I suggest a goal of making your yard or garden (or balcony or patio!) more attractive to pollinators? Gardening to ...
A little more room for pollinator plants
April 16, 2020 Taking out the stock-tank pond opened up a partly sunny spot in my shady garden. You can bet I wasn’t going to let that go to waste! Inside a new circle of diminutive ‘Micron’ hollies, which echo the form of ‘Winter Gem’ boxwoods at the entryways, I ...
Mexico City: Day trip to Teotihuacán pyramids
April 01, 2020 One pleasure of travel is the opportunity to marvel over monuments built by earlier civilizations: Stonehenge, Roman arenas and bridges, castles — and, most recently for us, Mesoamerican pyramids at Teotihuacán, about an hour’s drive northeast of Mexico City. We hired an Uber driver to take us ...
All cleaned up after live oak deluge
March 30, 2020 The garden reemerged last weekend, after copious raking and blowing and bagging, from the annual spring deluge of last season’s live oak leaves and subsequent pollen catkins. I ran around with the camera, capturing the gorgeousness of new flowers and fresh foliage, like this pretty combo of ...
Fall xeriscape garden at Rollingwood City Hall
November 25, 2019 ‘Strawberry Fields’ gomphrena blazes with color amid bold agaves and barrel cactus. While driving through West Austin on the Open Day garden tour earlier this month, I had a sixth-sense feeling that a garden was calling my name. Oh yes, I thought, remember the xeriscape garden at ...
