November 02, 2018
Wildflower mural energizes wall on Wood Hollow Drive
Austin artist Bill Tavis recently completed a zigzagging, energetic mural of Texas blanketflower on a large wall along Wood Hollow Drive in northwest Austin …
Butterfly vine seedpods flutter into fall garden
I welcome butterflies to my garden, whether floral or faunal …
End-of-summer garden
Austin is eager to bid a less-than-fond farewell to summer after a record-breaking hot and dry September. I can already see a change in the light, and my garden got a bit of rain last week. With any luck, by next week temperatures will finally drop …
Plant This: Mexican beautyberry
Mexican beautyberry is tall, dark, and handsome. It grew to 8 feet tall by its third year in my garden and equally wide. It may grow even larger, but I’ve had to prune it back a bit from my paths …
A peaceful morning in Cat’s garden
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 …
Nolina, yucca, and cypress add xeric structure in lush Austin garden
Have you ever seen a glorious spring garden fade by late summer into a semi-dormant hot mess? That’s what happens when you don’t have structural plants and hardscape to give your garden shape and interest in hotter, drier seasons …
Beneficial insects love a stock-tank pond too
A small water garden helps me endure a Texas summer that stretches well into October. The plinking and burbling of water, jewel-bright and pastel water lilies, and lush green lily pads all make the glaring Death Star (the Texas sun) less oppressive …
Thomas Rainer comes to Austin for Garden Spark
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 presentation for Garden Spark, the design-based speaker series I started 3 years ago …
Ganador the lucha libre grackle is ready to wrestle
The Austin artist whose grackles I absolutely adore is Christy Stallop, especially her lucha libre series. Yes, her grackles wear Mexican wrestler masks! Recently she branched out from painting on wood panels to sculpting a larger-than-life grackle, a project for which she won a TEMPO grant …
Sightseeing in Austin with our exchange student
We have a young exchange student from Italy living with us this school year, and part of the fun of that for us (and hopefully for her) is dragging her around Austin to see, well, everything …
Things are looking pretty crispy
It’s endless summer in Austin, and things are looking pretty crispy. The garden (and gardener) gasps for rain, and I’m seeing browned-out trees all over town. Enough is enough, Death Star! …
Pond plants aren’t sick of summer (but I am)
One thing I love about having a stock-tank pond is the visual cooling it provides, a little oasis in my Texas garden during our long, broiling summer. Pond plants like waterlilies never get crispy looking because they’re growing neck deep in cool water. Who wouldn’t want to spend the summer …
No Rain? No Problem. Read my interview about waterwise gardening in Garden Gate magazine
It’s been a hot, dry summer for a lot of us, and our gardens may be looking pretty parched right about now. I grow a waterwise garden here in Austin, but even so I lost a few plants after the rain spigot cut off in mid-July. There’s always more I …
Bat watching in Austin
Austin goes extra batty in August, when the colony of Mexican free-tailed bats under the Congress Avenue Bridge swells with newly flying pups. As the pups join their mothers on their nightly bug-eating flights, bat watching gets even better than usual …
