Garden rooms and green roof at Cloverleaf Drive Garden: Austin Open Days Tour 2017
November 13, 2017 This year’s Garden Conservancy-sponsored Open Days tour in Austin featured gardens in a variety of styles and a variety of neighborhoods (not just West Austin). I especially enjoyed exploring the Cloverleaf Drive garden, which, along with Jackson Broussard’s, is located east of I-35 in a “regular-folks” neighborhood ...
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 ...
Oxblood lilies popping up after Hurricane Harvey
August 30, 2017 Hurricane Harvey dumped nearly 10 inches of rain on my garden between last Friday and Sunday, and high winds littered the ground with leaves, twigs, and ball moss. A Texas mountain laurel fell over in the sodden soil, and we lost power for 6 hours. A weather ...
Garden of Gary Ratway and Deborah Whigham and their Digging Dog Nursery
August 23, 2017 Stepping through a dark-leaved doorway in a beech hedge into the display gardens at Digging Dog Nursery, located in Albion, California, you feel a bit like Alice falling into the rabbit hole. What awaits on the other side? A potted boxwood draws you through the hedge… …and ...
Long views and classic garden rooms in Brinitzer Garden: Capital Region Garden Bloggers Fling
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 ...
Blue fantasy in the garden of Linda Hostetler: Capital Region Garden Bloggers Fling
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 ...
English garden in Virginia horse country: Capital Region Garden Bloggers Fling
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 ...
Early summer garden offerings
June 11, 2017 A few offerings of early summer beauty in the garden. Beaked yucca (Y. rostrata ‘Sapphire Skies’) as seen from our deck — I enjoy this topside view of the spiky stunner. The galvanized pie-plate planters I filled with succulent cuttings in March have filled out beautifully. Here’s ...
Bald cypress creek, beer patios, & other comforts in Comfort, Texas
May 31, 2017 For our 27th wedding anniversary last weekend, my husband and I enjoyed a weekend away in Comfort, Texas, a tiny Hill Country town two hours southwest of Austin. After reading about the stylishly rustic charms of Camp Comfort in seemingly every regional magazine (Tribeza, Southern Living, Texas ...
Early summer flowers brighten my Texas garden
May 28, 2017 I didn’t realize how many white flowers I’m growing until I photographed what’s blooming this week. Let’s start with pale pavonia, aka Brazilian rock rose (Pavonia hastata). I love the tissuey white flower with a maroon eye and veins. I grew a moonflower vine (Ipomoea alba), one ...
Life is beautiful at Moroccan-inspired Tanglewild Gardens
May 25, 2017 As we roll toward summer here in Austin, this gardener begins to fantasize about decamping for cooler climes, like the Pacific Northwest, a gardener’s paradise. So it was surprising and enlightening to hear Skottie O’Mahony and Jeff Breitenstein, longtime Seattle residents who are now cultivating an exotic, ...
New shade sails and other garden goodness
May 05, 2017 We’ve always wanted shade for our deck, which is one of the few spots in our yard not overhung by live oaks. Facing south, it gets blasted by the Death Star all day long, and even our kitchen table overlooking the deck gets unpleasantly toasty by midafternoon ...
Cottage garden meets Zen garden: Inside Austin Gardens Tour 2017
May 03, 2017 Ever get the hankering to have two different styles of gardens at once? Daphne Jeffers — whose east Austin garden will be on the Inside Austin Gardens Tour this Saturday, May 6 — made it happen, with a flowery cottage garden out front and, in a surprising ...
Easter Sunday Foliage Follow-Up
April 16, 2017 I’m imagining my blog feed filling up with pictures of pastel Easter eggs and white lilies. But here at Digging, in spite of a flurry of kitchen activity (I’m making Tex-Mex deviled eggs and a lemon cake), it’s still Foliage Follow-Up. Let’s start with the stock-tank pond ...
Let’s take a walk around the garden
April 10, 2017 Live oak leaf and pollen season is finally over, and the patios are clean again, hallelujah! This calls for a spring garden stroll, so let’s go. I’ve been playing with a squid theme on one wall of the upper patio. A couple of tentacle pots from Tentacle ...
Gorgeous flowering of a pond iris and more
March 27, 2017 As buds began to swell last week, I’ve been eagerly awaiting the flowering of my pond iris. And this morning, three burgundy, yellow-throated flowers unfurled. They look especially picturesque as viewed against the turquoise shed doors. Several more buds mean more flowers to come. Jenny/Rock Rose gave ...
