Waterwise beauty and metal animal safari in Linda Peterson’s San Antonio garden
December 05, 2018 An invitation to Linda Peterson’s garden in San Antonio proved too tempting a treat to resist on the day before Halloween. I arrived in San Antonio in time to tour the terrific new culinary and adventure gardens at San Antonio Botanical Garden before heading over to Linda’s mint-green ...
Book Review: Dry Gardens: High Style for Low Water Gardens
November 03, 2018 Not so long ago, a book about dry gardens in the U.S. would have featured cactus and rocks. Dry stuff indeed, except for the cactus aficionado. Over the past couple of decades, as drought and water shortages have led to a growing acceptance that thirsty lawns and ...
Rainy day visit to Jenny Stocker’s garden
October 23, 2018 A visit to Jenny Stocker‘s gorgeous walled garden is always a treat, even on a chilly, rainy day like last Friday (and actually all this month). Jenny kindly opened her garden to me and my friend Susan Morrison, who was in town for a Garden Spark presentation, ...
3rd hottest summer in Austin’s history inching to a close
September 03, 2018 Have you heard any whimpering — or hopefully just stoic silence — from your Central Texas gardening friends this summer? Here’s why: we’ve been hammered by the Death Star and no rain for months now. It’s officially the 3rd hottest summer on record (as measured from June ...
Garden powers through a Texas heat wave
July 24, 2018 Arizona-level heat is plaguing us here in Austin this week. Temps reached 110 F (43.3 C) yesterday, and we’re cooling down to “only” 101-105 F all the rest of this week. The Death Star is on high beam! The garden must power through, as must we all, ...
Rock stars at Kew: Alpine House rockery and dry garden
July 14, 2018 I’ve never been much into glasshouses. I generally find them jungly, warm, and humid — conditions I don’t enjoy during Austin’s long summers and don’t wish to experience artificially. But an alpine glasshouse, with cool temps, tidy potted plants, and a nice breeze? Bring it on! While ...
Kirk Walden’s Hill Country garden atop Lake Austin
May 25, 2018 With this killer view of Lake Austin, many homeowners might have sodded a lawn, plunked a few pots of annuals around the pool, and called it done. But Kirk Walden, whose garden was the final stop on the recent Austin Garden Bloggers Fling tour (I photographed it ...
Bloom spikes!
May 19, 2018 This is the bloom-spikiest spring I can remember in Austin. All over town, agaves, sotols, aloes, hesperaloes, mangaves, manfredas, and yuccas are sending up flowering wands or blooming candelabras. My own garden is no exception, but the spikes I’m most excited by are towering over two Texas ...
A little Palm Springs, a little New Orleans, all Texas in the garden of Curt Arnette
May 16, 2018 I’ve been after my friend Curt Arnette, landscape-architect owner of Sitio Design, to open his personal garden on tour for years. But because he likes to change things up at home (plus being busy with his work projects), he’s always said it wasn’t ready. Persistence pays off, ...
Glorious wildflowers and agaves in Jenny Stocker’s garden
April 20, 2018 Spring in Austin is glorious this year, and especially so in my friend Jenny Stocker’s garden. The Rock Rose blogger cultivates a gravel garden of mostly Texas native wildflowers and grasses sown among woody lilies like agave and yucca, accented with structural rockwork she and her husband, ...
Waterwise outside, oasis inside a walled Sonoma garden
January 25, 2018 Last August a family road trip took me through Sonoma, California, where I had the pleasure of seeing a garden I was writing about for Garden Design magazine. The owner, Marilyn Coon Stocke, had generously extended an invitation to me and my family, and so we stopped ...
Spiky garden of Matt Shreves
December 10, 2017 Six months ago I visited the spikylicious garden of Matt Shreves, an Austin gardener I met on Instagram (see his Instagram page at OG_Agave). Last month, he kindly invited the Austin blogger group over (or maybe we invited ourselves over, and he graciously agreed), so I got ...
Sedgey front garden and xeriscape terrace
December 06, 2017 For one West Austin homeowner, this is the view from her front door: an undulating, rhythmic front walk of poured-concrete pavers wending through a meadowy swath of Berkeley sedge, soap aloes, and purple heart, with a scrim of yaupon hollies shielding the view of the street. A ...
Water-saving Ridgewood Road Garden: Austin Open Days Tour 2017
November 22, 2017 The talented Annie Gillespie of Botanical Concerns designed the water-saving garden at Ridgewood Road, the next garden in my recap of Austin’s recent Open Days Tour. From the street you’re invited to stroll through a low-water garden of oaks, grasses, agave, and yucca to reach the house ...
Waterwise drama in Lakemoore Drive Garden: Austin Open Days Tour 2017
November 20, 2017 Continuing my coverage of the November 4th Open Days tour, today I give you the Lakemoore Drive Garden. Regular readers may recognize this garden as one I blogged about, rapturously, in 2013. The outer garden, a sun-loving gravel garden with evergreen xeric plants like agave, yucca, prickly ...
Linda Peterson’s green-walled xeriscape garden: San Antonio Open Days Tour
October 25, 2017 The highlight of the recent San Antonio Open Days garden tour, as I knew it would be, was Linda Peterson’s beautiful xeriscape and green-walled courtyard garden. Twice before I’ve had the pleasure of exploring Linda’s garden (in September 2015 and April 2016), and the artistry of her ...
