Earthshaking thrills at Yosemite’s Half Dome
July 17, 2020 Half Dome as seen from Cook’s Meadow On Day 2 of our June Yosemite visit (click here for part 1 and here for how we pulled off the trip), we rose well before dawn, drove the 40 minutes into the park, and dropped David off at the ...
Yosemite National Park, grand temple of nature
July 14, 2020 An epic vista, including El Capitan on the left and Half Dome in the distance, greets you at the Tunnel View pullout. Half Dome. El Capitan. Tuolumne Meadows. Yosemite Falls. The names of Yosemite’s majestic granite walls, grassy leas, and thundering waterfalls are more familiar to many ...
Wildflowers and waterfalls at Kings Canyon National Park
July 12, 2020 Eriodictyon parryi, or poodle dog bush When you visit Sequoia National Park in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, you get two parks for the price of one. Kings Canyon National Park abuts Sequoia’s northern edge, and the parks are managed together; one admission gets you into both. It’s ...
Bears and giant trees at Sequoia National Park
July 08, 2020 After detouring to visit the Grand Canyon in Arizona (see our route in my previous post), we continued westward through California’s sere Mojave Desert. At last the land rose and formed the Golden State’s crinkled, tawny hills, stubbled with spreading, olive-green live oaks. By mid-afternoon we’d reached ...
Grand views at Grand Canyon
July 07, 2020 We steered clear of crowded lookout points like this one at Grand Canyon. In the before-times, a summer road trip was a pleasurable, even adventurous, undertaking. In the covid era it feels almost miraculous to pull off any kind of travel while adhering to federal and local ...
Mexico City: Jacaranda purple haze, Centro Histórico, and native plants
March 27, 2020 A romantic, violet veil brightens Mexico City each spring, when jacaranda trees unfurl a profusion of purple flowers on bare, sinuous trunks lining parkways, park paths, and residential streets. Jacaranda trees I caught sight of the purple haze from the airplane as we descended over the smoggy ...
Exploring the massive granite dome of Enchanted Rock
February 24, 2020 A bald dome of pinkish granite swells above the live oak scrub along a rolling stretch of Hill Country blacktop 17 miles north of Fredericksburg, Texas. Enchanted Rock has been enchanting nature lovers for as long as there have been people here, at least 11,000 years. Last ...
White rock, green river at Pedernales Falls
February 09, 2020 Winter days in Texas make good hiking days: cool (or at least not hot) temps, sunny blue skies, and no bugs. We drove west to Pedernales Falls State Park last weekend to explore and scramble over the exposed rocky riverbed and admire placid green water. Starved for ...
Laid-back living at Lake Livingston
January 16, 2020 Is there any place more relaxing than a lakehouse? On the way to New Orleans last month, we spent two nights at my sister’s little place on Lake Livingston, about an hour north of Houston in East Texas. With feet propped up on the deck rail, I ...
Autumn hike at Hamilton Pool grotto
December 14, 2019 Hamilton Pool called my name last month, and I answered by scheduling a visit through the state’s reservation page. Yes, Hamilton Pool Preserve is so heavily visited nowadays that the county park system requires a reservation to visit on weekends, and every day in warmer months. Is ...
Hilltop getaway at Two Coves Garden: Austin Open Day tour
November 21, 2019 The last garden I visited on the Open Day tour sponsored by The Garden Conservancy was designed by B. Jane Gardens, and which B. has continued to maintain for the last three owners. Located off City Park Road, the Two Coves Drive Garden perches atop a hill ...
Hilltop pollinator garden of Ruthie Burrus: Austin Open Day tour
November 20, 2019 Having visited Ruthie Burrus’s garden before (including at Austin Garden Bloggers Fling), I knew it would be one of my favorites on the Austin Open Days tour in November, sponsored by The Garden Conservancy. Let’s start with the entry garden, where a concrete trough softened by ferns ...
November walk at Lady Bird Lake
November 06, 2019 A perfect fall day calls for a walk around Lady Bird Lake, so on Sunday there I was, at Lou Neff Point, viewing Austin’s mushrooming skyline and the towering Jenga building. Taking the U-turn trail around Barton Creek, I paused to admire the green spring water and ...
Casa Neverlandia and sculpture by James Talbot keep Austin delightfully weird
October 10, 2019 Never pass up a chance to see something creative or unusual. Seeing how someone’s passion gets turned into art fascinates me. So when I heard about Casa Neverlandia, the home of fellow Rice University grad, artist, architect, and free spirit James Talbot, I knew I had to ...
A peaceful morning in Cat’s garden
September 28, 2019 A week ago in my friend Cat Jones’s garden, I found my attention divided between her new canyon-side stock-tank pond topped with a glorious flowering crinum and the rolling green canyon vista itself. For a few minutes, the crinum won out, and I exclaimed jealously over the ...
Thomas Rainer comes to Austin for Garden Spark
September 23, 2019 Thomas Rainer, a Washington, D.C.-based landscape architect and author of Planting in a Post-Wild World, came to Austin last week to give a terrific presentation for Garden Spark, the design-based speaker series I started 3 years ago. Sixty attendees — home gardeners, designers, horticulturists, landscape architects, and ...
