Visit to Tucson Botanical Gardens, part 1
October 29, 2012 An early morning photo shoot at Tucson Botanical Gardens, one of the events at the recent Garden Writers Association symposium, gave me (and about 60 other garden writers and photographers) a chance to see the gardens relatively uncrowded and illuminated by the rising sun. I expected a ...
Artful desert garden of Keith and Helga Zwickl
October 28, 2012Morning light gilds the cactus and succulent garden Keith and Helga Zwickl welcomed us to their Tucson, Arizona, garden during the Garden Writers Association symposium a couple of weeks ago. I really enjoyed this garden, not only for its stunning collection of cacti and succulents, but also for ...
The DreamFlower desert garden of Lorien Tersey
October 26, 2012Arizona adobe When you have to jackhammer the “soil” to plant anything, when your garden gets only 12 inches of rainfall a year, when you live in a desert, you just know gardening isn’t going to be easy. And yet, despite these conditions in Tucson, Arizona, which I ...
Colored walls in a desert oasis: Garden of Alan Richards
October 25, 2012Rhapsody in blue What do you expect to see when you visit a desert garden? Cactus, of course, in all its architectural, spiny splendor. I recently attended the annual Garden Writers Association Symposium, held this year in Tucson, Arizona. We were bused to three private gardens, along with ...
Garden writers convene in the desert for Tucson GWA Symposium
October 21, 2012 A few short years ago I didn’t think of myself as a garden writer. I was a garden blogger, plain and simple. But then I started getting offered, and learned to pursue, paid writing assignments, and now I have a book coming out, a fact that still ...
Read This: The Gardener’s Guide to Cactus
July 09, 2012 Cactus is one of those categories of plant that is either hated or adored. One either shuns cactus altogether or turns into a cactus nut, acquiring as many species as possible, filling one’s garden with spiny specimens, and building greenhouses (always more than one) to house freeze-tender ...
Ten Eyck garden beckons at Thunderbird Hotel in Marfa
March 25, 2012 On our way home from Big Bend last weekend, we cruised through Marfa for lunch and a quick look around town. When we spotted the Thunderbird Hotel’s Capri Lounge, an event space and former Army storage hangar, we stopped to tour the Christy Ten Eyck-designed garden surrounding ...
Nightlife in Terlingua, Texas: Ghost town and the Starlight Theatre
March 21, 2012 In my post about Big Bend National Park, I mentioned that I preferred the evenings, when the glaring sun slid behind the mountains and the stars came out. In the desert, perhaps it’s always been so. Evening is a time of coolness and relaxation, dinner around the ...
Canyons, river, and sky: Big Bend country (Days 2-3)
March 20, 2012 Following up on my overall impressions of Big Bend National Park, today I’ll take you on a tour of the sights. Our first morning we drove up into the Chisos Mountains to hike the Chisos Basin Loop Trail. At an elevation of 4,500 feet over the desert ...
Big sky, scorched earth at Big Bend National Park (Day 1)
March 19, 2012 Lured west by the mystery of one of America’s lesser known national parks, we packed broad-brimmed hats, sunscreen, and several gallons of water in the trunk and left behind the crowds of SXSW last Wednesday, driving for 8 hours through increasingly open country to Big Bend. Traveling ...
