Does my garden look tasty to does?
April 25, 2018 Does the aloe that’s flowering like a coral-colored candelabra look yummy? Does that yucca bloom spike look tasty? Does the yellow bulbine look succulicious? Does the yellow puffball on the goldenball leadtree (Leucaena retusa) — the first time it’s ever bloomed! — look scrumptious? Probably not, actually ...
Fiddleheads and other unfurlings
March 11, 2018 Fiddle-dee-dee! It’s looking ferny around here. River fern (Thelypteris kunthii) fiddleheads are popping up beneath the Japanese maple, right on schedule. Unfurling into shepherds’ hooks, the fronds will soon fill out and add springtime lushness to the shade garden. The spiraling fiddleheads are so freaking cute! They ...
Hungry garden visitors
February 19, 2018 High-pitched, whistling cries have filled the skies lately, alerting me to our cedar waxwing visitors. Flocking into berry-laden junipers (i.e., “cedars”), possumhaw and yaupon hollies, hackberries, and even invasive ligustrum to gorge themselves, these beautiful crested and masked birds can strip a tree clean of berries in ...
Autumn stroll around my garden
October 27, 2017 Autumn is my favorite season in the garden, when the Death Star abates and cool breezes blow in from the north, pushing that Gulf Coast humidity back to Houston where it belongs. The sky goes china blue, fall perennials burst into bloom, and fall-blooming grasses incandesce in ...
Newborns and other wildlife in the garden
May 17, 2017 While I was turning off a hose Monday, water dribbled into a thick stand of inland sea oats, and something moved among the grasses. I saw a small head and thought, cat. Having endured a year of a neighbor’s cat using my gravel path as a toilet, ...
Sunshiny sedum and oh deer
February 19, 2017 The late-winter garden cut-back continues, but spring has sprung as far as pretty Palmer’s sedum is concerned. Honeybees have been busy among the flowers, although I managed to miss them in this closeup. While working in the lower garden, I heard a rustling in the greenbelt just ...
Deer antlering damage to my agave
January 13, 2017 The bucks have been at it again this winter, rubbing their antlers on agaves, yuccas, hesperaloes, and small trees throughout my neighborhood. I always cage my small possumhaw holly in early fall through early spring, but I was hoping I could get away with less structural deterrents ...
Silobration at Magnolia Market and Fixer Upper fandom
October 12, 2016 Uninitiated into the world of Chip and Joanna Gaines and their HGTV show Fixer Upper because we don’t have cable TV, I’d nevertheless picked up an inkling of their popularity from fellow bloggers and multiple magazine features. So when we were in Waco last Saturday for one ...
Fawning over our new garden resident
June 21, 2016 There’s a baby boom happening in our northwest Austin neighborhood. Yep, it’s fawn season. This one’s mom has been leaving him in the front garden, in a raised bed along the driveway, tucked into soft Berkeley sedge or silvery woolly stemodia, while she goes off to forage ...
Grasses and deer-smashes for December Foliage Follow-Up
December 16, 2015 A hard freeze has not yet walloped my garden, but even if it had I’d still be able to enjoy the plants I’m showing today for Foliage Follow-Up. Take pearl millet, aka ‘Vertigo’ grass (Pennisetum purpureum ‘Vertigo’), for example. This was the most-asked-about plant on my garden ...
Decked and swinging at the Wildflower Center
December 10, 2015 The weather has been so beautiful lately — Austin’s payoff for making it through another summer. Last Sunday, the whole family joined me for an afternoon stroll at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, one of my very favorite places. Right now it’s a mix of fall ...
Drive-By Gardens: A new lawn-gone garden in my neighborhood
November 19, 2015 Bravo to my neighbors, who’ve ripped out their front lawn and replaced it with native groundcovers woolly stemodia (Stemodia lanata) and sedge (probably Carex texensis), accented with xeric specimen plants like Agave parryi var. truncata, gopher plant (Euphorbia rigida), Wheeler sotol (Dasylirion wheeleri), squid agave (Agave bracteosa), ...
Come see my garden on the Inside Austin Gardens Tour
August 25, 2015 The Inside Austin Gardens Tour is coming up soon, in a little less than two months, and my garden will be on it. This will be my first time on a public tour, and I hope that you’ll come and say hi. I love the slogan for ...
Plant This: Turk’s cap
July 21, 2015 Death Star-adapted plants tend to be small-leaved and airy, the better to retain precious water. But our native Turk’s cap (Malvaviscus arboreus var. drummondii) defies that expectation with vaguely heart-shaped leaves the size of a napkin scrounged out of your car’s glove box, and just as crinkled ...
Fawning over this garden visitor
May 30, 2015 For two mornings in a row this tiny fawn lay curled in the shaggy sedge lawn, its back against a tree, waiting for its mother to return from grazing somewhere down the street. I walked right by it the first day, oblivious, and stopped to pull weeds ...
Evergreens, color, and hardscape carry garden through winter into spring
March 11, 2015 A recent conversation on Linda Lehmusvirta‘s Facebook page got a few Austin gardeners talking about winter interest. Tracie, a local gardener, wrote that her mostly native garden looks great spring through fall but is “asleep” in winter, and she wanted ideas. Lori at The Gardener of Good ...
