Roses, butterflies & garden goodness at Antique Rose Emporium
November 08, 2016 On Saturday my mom and I drove out to Brenham, Texas, for the Antique Rose Emporium‘s Fall Festival of Roses, where I was one of the day’s speakers. A gray sky spit rain on us during the 2-hour drive, but it held off as we strolled around ...
Roses, butterflies & garden goodness at Antique Rose Emporium
November 08, 2016 On Saturday my mom and I drove out to Brenham, Texas, for the Antique Rose Emporium‘s Fall Festival of Roses, where I was one of the day’s speakers. A gray sky spit rain on us during the 2-hour drive, but it held off as we strolled around ...
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 ...
Bugs and butterflies at the Wildflower Center, part 2
October 04, 2016 Continuing our garden stroll through Austin’s Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center (here’s part 1 of my visit), let’s enter the Family Garden, where paving by the restrooms and shade pavilion is softened with rain gardens planted with water-appreciating native plants. A rain garden, Texas-style, planted with mistflower, ...
Visiting Layanee’s ledge and garden in Rhode Island
July 21, 2016 Wherever I travel these days, I seem to know a garden blogger who lives there. That’s partly because I’ve been blogging and reading blogs for a decade and partly because I’ve gotten to know lots of bloggers in person through years of attending the annual Garden Bloggers ...
Bloomin’ cactus, verbena, and Moby
April 22, 2016 It’s been raining cats and dogs here in Austin — and raining lions and wolves, if that’s an appropriate comparison, over in Houston. Our lakes are full again (which seems a miracle, considering how low they got during the multi-year drought), and spring seems full of promise ...
Festive spring at Lucinda Hutson’s purple cottage
April 08, 2016 Many times over the years, I’ve had the pleasure of visiting Lucinda Hutson‘s purple cottage in the Rosedale neighborhood of central Austin. It’s always a riot of flowers and festive decor. On Tuesday I stopped by to visit again and am so glad I did. Butter-yellow blossoms ...
Spring blooms and greens
March 26, 2016 My only Texas bluebonnet (Lupinus texensis) this year is a volunteer that popped up in a decomposed-granite path next to the driveway. I should just seed this whole path with bluebonnets and enjoy the show next year. The live oaks that shade my entire garden recently dropped ...
Dividing and conquering in the Volk Garden: GWA Pasadena
October 23, 2015 A long, shallow back yard sloping away from the house isn’t easy to turn into an inviting garden (I should know), but terracing and space-dividing hedges did the trick in this San Marino, California, garden. Owned by Robert and Caroline Volk and designed by Mark Bartos, this ...
Steel walls and soft grasses in travel-influenced Mirador Garden
November 04, 2014 A week ago I had the opportunity to photograph another of landscape architect Curt Arnette‘s gardens. Frothy, rose-colored clouds of Gulf muhly, tawny spikes of Lindheimer muhly, and a chartreuse Habiturf lawn wrap the large front garden in a cozy quilt of softness that counterbalances the flat ...
Heather’s Xericstyle garden in San Antonio
October 27, 2014 Last week I roadtripped south with a few friends to see the gardens of our San Antonio blogger friends, Heather Ginsburg of Xericstyle and Shirley Fox of Rock-Oak-Deer, plus Shirley’s neighbor and gardening friend Melody. I posted about Shirley’s garden here. Today I’ll show you Heather’s garden ...
Monarchs flutter into Dallas Arboretum on fall migration
October 09, 2014 We weren’t the only visitors to the Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Garden last Sunday. Aside from all the human visitors, hundreds of monarch butterflies arrived on the north wind blowing into Texas and settled into the garden for a rest stop. I understand their fall migration is ...
A tiger in the salvia
September 28, 2014 A butterfly as big as my hand fluttered along the streetside border, which is ablaze with the hot-pink flowers of autumn sage (Salvia greggii). The yellow-and-black stripes are the distinctive markings of the eastern tiger swallowtail butterfly. Beating her wings nearly constantly as she fed, she flapped ...
Construction in the garden and other happenings
September 17, 2014 It was a one-two punch, seeing colorful stuccoed walls in Phoenix and Tucson in April and then in Portland in July. Unable to resist the siren song of structure, functionality, and color, I’ve hired a mason to build some walls in the back garden. Two days ago ...
Nature Nights introduces kids to the Wildflower Center’s new Family Garden
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 ...
Nursery Visit: Civano Nursery in Tucson, Arizona
April 23, 2014 After my drive-by of Civano’s candy-colored homes and front-yard gardens while in Tucson earlier this month, I popped into Civano Nursery for a look around. Yep, that’s right. The lucky residents of Civano have a full-service nursery in their neighborhood, within wagon-pulling distance of many of the ...
