Nurseries/Shops

January 31, 2017 I popped in at Vivero Growers in far southwest Austin last week and was smitten by their beautiful container plantings, like this absolutely stunning succulent pot. The owner tells me her niece created it while working at the nursery last summer. Of course they’ve protected it from ...

November 08, 2016 On Saturday my mom and I drove out to Brenham, Texas, for the Antique Rose Emporium‘s Fall Festival of Roses, where I was one of the day’s speakers. A gray sky spit rain on us during the 2-hour drive, but it held off as we strolled around ...

November 08, 2016 On Saturday my mom and I drove out to Brenham, Texas, for the Antique Rose Emporium‘s Fall Festival of Roses, where I was one of the day’s speakers. A gray sky spit rain on us during the 2-hour drive, but it held off as we strolled around ...

November 03, 2016Texas gardeners, come on out to The Antique Rose Emporium Fall Festival in Brenham, Texas, this weekend for entertaining and educational garden speakers, beautiful display gardens, and fun! I’ll be speaking this Saturday, November 5th, from 1:30 to 2:30 pm. My talk, with plenty of eye-candy photos, is ...

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 ...

October 06, 2016 Three weeks after its grand opening, I climbed the glittering, mirrored grand staircase at the 62,000-square-foot mansion known as RH Austin (Restoration Hardware, rebranded), one of the anchor stores in the new Northside section of The Domain shopping center in north Austin. After a cursory inspection of ...

September 18, 2016 Lately I’m taking as many garden photos with my phone as with my “real” camera, and these often get posted to my Instagram. But not all of them, and sometimes I like to share them on my blog too. So here’s some cool stuff I spotted last ...

July 31, 2016 Our tour buses took us out of Minneapolis on the last day of the recent Garden Bloggers Fling — an annual event with 60+ garden bloggers touring Minneapolis this year — through St. Paul and on into charming Afton, Minnesota, where we visited nursery and gift shop ...

July 20, 2016 I’ve been reading author and plantswoman Nancy Ondra’s blog, Hayefield, for nearly a decade. Although we’d never met, we’ve been friendly online. After all, she donated one of her books as a door prize for the first Garden Bloggers Fling in Austin in 2008, I’ve written about ...

June 20, 2016 Anthropologie meets Flora Grubb Gardens? Yes, please! While in the Brandywine Valley outside of Philadelphia earlier this month, I was eager to visit Terrain, a nursery, home and garden shop, and restaurant located in Glen Mills, Pennsylvania. (There’s a second location in Westport, Connecticut.) Founded by the ...

May 11, 2016 Manchaca Road in South Austin may as well be on the other side of the planet for this northwest Austinite, or so it seems most days while parked on our city’s interminably clogged highways and streets. But the stars aligned yesterday for a cross-town jaunt, and I ...

April 26, 2016 This fun flower, held aloft on a 6-foot stalk, is blooming right now in multiple spots in my garden: ‘Chocolate Chips’ manfreda (Manfreda undulata ‘Chocolate Chips’), my absolute favorite manfreda, with ruffled, succulent leaves covered in chocolatey freckles. It’s a beautiful, dry-loving plant that’s perfect for a ...

April 16, 2016 I get succulent fever every time I see a display like this. A luscious succulent fountain dripping with string-of-pearls senecio — what better way to introduce a “watery” feature into your garden without using much actual H2O? Let’s take a little field trip to Hill Country Water ...

April 13, 2016 Last Wednesday, KUT’s “Morning Edition” host Jennifer Stayton interviewed me for a podcast as part of the Coffee with the Author series at Holy Grounds, a coffee shop/bookstore/gift shop located downtown in St. David’s Episcopal Church. I was honored to join their author series, which is held ...

April 13, 2016 Last Wednesday, KUT’s “Morning Edition” host Jennifer Stayton interviewed me for a podcast as part of the Coffee with the Author series at Holy Grounds, a coffee shop/bookstore/gift shop located downtown in St. David’s Episcopal Church. I was honored to join their author series, which is held ...

April 01, 2016 Mom and I stopped at Wildseed Farms, just east of Fredericksburg, Texas, on the way home from our Hill Country wildflower drive on Tuesday. Wildseed Farms grows wildflowers for their seed, which it sells to landscapers, retail customers, and highway departments that seed wildflowers along roadsides. With ...