Play spaces

July 04, 2016 From the formal House Garden at Chanticleer, the garden path steps off into space — or rather, onto the new elevated walkway that provides an accessible, curving descent down a sloping meadow of foxtail lilies, feathergrass, bee balm, coneflowers, and other sun lovers. I visited Chanticleer, a ...

June 26, 2016 Maybe Southerners don’t need conservatories because our winters are pretty green. Growing up in the South, I don’t recall ever visiting a conservatory until I started garden traveling to northern states. (We don’t have a culture of spring garden shows either, perhaps for the same reason.) Call ...

June 18, 2016 Forget wooden playscapes, jungle gyms, and climbing walls. The most magical children’s gardens consist of natural spaces that invite exploration, slowly reveal secret spaces, and encourage imaginative play. Such is Enchanted Woods, the children’s garden at Winterthur, located in Winterthur, Delaware, which I visited with Diana/Sharing Nature’s ...

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 ...

February 06, 2016 Well, this is a surprise! Bluebonnets (Lupinus texensis) ordinarily bloom in April, but a bonny patch was abloom yesterday in the family garden at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. Don’t go running over for your photo op with the kids. Only about 3 plants are blooming ...

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 ...

June 30, 2015 For nearly 100 years, Don Valley Brick Works supplied Toronto with masonry bricks and helped the city rebuild and grow after a devastating fire. By 1984, however, the kilns were closed down, and the factory buildings languished. Urban explorers and partying teens found their way in, and ...

April 14, 2015 For my third and final post about last Saturday’s visit to the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, I’ll lead with the state flower and inducer of innumerable spring photo ops: the Texas bluebonnet (Lupinus texensis), pictured here with a smattering of Indian paintbrush (Castilleja indivisa). Flower peeping ...

April 14, 2015 For my third and final post about last Saturday’s visit to the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, I’ll lead with the state flower and inducer of innumerable spring photo ops: the Texas bluebonnet (Lupinus texensis), pictured here with a smattering of Indian paintbrush (Castilleja indivisa). Flower peeping ...

April 14, 2015 Spring is the Wildflower Center‘s showiest season, and last Saturday I shared the gardens with many other flower-peepers. (Click for part 1 of my Wildflower Center visit.) In this post we’ll revisit the nearly 1-year-old Luci and Ian Family Garden, where Gulf Coast penstemon (Penstemon tenuis) was ...

October 19, 2014 At the end of Part 1 of my post about visiting the High Line in New York City last weekend, we’d just entered Chelsea Market Passage. After the dimness of the passageway, you exit into bright sunlight on the aptly named Sun Deck. Wooden lounge chairs resembling ...

October 08, 2014 The Dallas Arboretum goes pumpkin crazy each fall. Last Sunday we visited to see their over-the-top Pumpkin Village, in which a whopping 65,000 pumpkins, gourds, and squash are used to create play houses, line paths, and fill a pumpkin patch that would make Linus proud. The pumpkin ...

June 17, 2014 My kids are teens now and well past playground age. But I’m not! Since the Luci and Ian Family Garden opened on May 4, I’ve been wanting to check it out. I previewed the garden before it was completed in mid-March and could see it would be ...

June 03, 2014Gardens Are for LivingSouthern California is all about outdoor living, and its sunny, retro-modern vibe appeals to many Austinites, including myself. Although their summer sun is a Legoland version of the Death Star and frost rarely nips their tender plants, we Austinites with a modernist bent can find ...

March 19, 2014 Water feature with streams, pond, rocks, and grotto in the new children’s garden Some of you already know this story. In early 2000, while visiting the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center with my baby daughter and 3-year-old son, I unexpectedly met Lady Bird and her daughter Luci ...

March 19, 2014 Water feature with streams, pond, rocks, and grotto in the new children’s garden Some of you already know this story. In early 2000, while visiting the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center with my baby daughter and 3-year-old son, I unexpectedly met Lady Bird and her daughter Luci ...