Two must-read books for succulent lovers: Succulents and Designing with Succulents
September 20, 2017 All you succulent junkies, listen up. If you love succulents or want to learn how to grow them, two newly released books by succulent-gardening trailblazers Debra Lee Baldwin and Robin Stockwell need to be at the top of your must-read list. Let’s start with Designing with Succulents ...
A narrow side yard lives large in the garden of Rebecca Sams and Buell Steelman
September 08, 2017 I don’t think I planned a family road trip from San Francisco to Portland just to have an opportunity to swing through Eugene, Oregon, to visit the garden of Buell Steelman and Rebecca Sams, the husband-and-wife design-and-build team at Mosaic Gardens, whose work I greatly admire and ...
Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens, part 2: Succulents, Ocean Trail, and Dahlia Garden
August 29, 2017 In my last post I showed you the Perennial Garden and Heath and Heather Collection at Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens in Ft. Bragg, California, which I visited in early August. Today let’s continue the tour, starting with the Succulent and Mediterranean Gardens. My first thought upon seeing ...
Edibles, outdoor living, and more at Sunset Gardens at Cornerstone Sonoma
August 21, 2017 While touring the Cornerstone Sonoma gardens in Sonoma, California, a couple of weeks ago, I enjoyed a two-fer. Sunset’s Test Gardens relocated to Cornerstone in 2016, and after a year of growth they’re already looking amazing. A glowing vertical garden of sempervivums, planted in the orange Sunset ...
Tropical cottage style in Diane and Tom Peace’s garden
April 22, 2017 Diane and Tom Peace of Lockhart, 30 miles south of Austin, live and garden in two very different regions: south-central Texas from winter through early spring, and Denver, Colorado, from late spring through fall. Tom, a grower and nurseryman, owns Texas Mountain Flora in Lockhart, operates a ...
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 ...
Refreshed porch pots and tiki hut
March 19, 2017 Happy Sunday morning! After a week of family illness at Chez Penick, I finally got in some gardening time this weekend. Here are my refreshed containers on the back porch steps. The purple oxalis (Oxalis triangularis) in the turquoise pot gets all the oohs, and no wonder ...
New galvanized wall planters hold succulent cuttings
March 03, 2017 Spring fever has hit! For me, that manifests as refreshing my many pots of succulents, some of which have been inside all winter, others huddled against the house, and others (too big to move) left to weather as they will. If they took a winter hit, I’m ...
Early flowerliciouness in Austin this spring
February 23, 2017 Purple oxalis flowers delicately echo its purple leaves Texas redbuds, Texas mountain laurel, spiderwort, and even some bluebonnets are surprising Austinites this spring with early blooming. I can usually count on sniffing the grape Kool-Aid-scented blossoms of Texas mountain laurel well into mid-March, but they may be ...
Garden clean-up in progress for Foliage Follow-Up
February 16, 2017 The pond patio garden is mostly evergreen, so the big cleanup here occurs later, in March, when I muck out the pond and divide the water plants. With our brief winter segueing right into spring, February is a transitional month here in Central Texas. We may yet ...
Container gardens at Vivero to banish the winter blues
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 ...
Hello, winter — you’ve zapped my garden
January 16, 2017 Hello, winter! We’re not used to seeing you here in Central Texas. Despite predictions of a mild winter, with the warming influence of a La Niña, we’ve already had two multi-day stretches of hard freezes, with a couple of nights dropping into the upper teens. The result? ...
Remembering 2016 in the garden
January 01, 2017 January Happy New Year, everyone! Following Jean’s example at Dig, Grow, Compost, Blog, I’m recapping 2016 with a single photo from each of the past 12 months in my garden. Poring over my old blog posts, I was reminded of the fleeting charms of the passing seasons ...
Lucinda’s Dia de los Muertos garden
November 01, 2016 My friend Lucinda Hutson celebrates Dia de los Muertos like no one else I know. Her colorful, Mexican-inspired home and garden in the Rosedale neighborhood of central Austin grows even more vibrant for Day of the Dead, and inside she stages elaborate table displays and beautiful altars ...
Spiky plant love, decor and more
October 05, 2016 Check out my neighbor’s beautiful blue rose of an agave, which I planted for her several years ago. Yes, you guessed it: it’s a whale’s tongue agave (A. ovatifolia), and it’s quickly grown into a truly stunning specimen. Surrounded by minty-leaved autumn sage (Salvia greggii), it has ...
